Border Towns: What to Do and Where to Do It
Texas offers a wealth of restaurants, bars, shopping, sightseeing, and pleasures of the flesh along the 1248-mile Mexican border that stretches from El Paso to Brownsville. It's close, it's different, and it's fun.
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Any discussion of restaurants in Acuña must, of course, begin at Mrs. Crosby's. The main room is long and airy, lined with arches and windows that look out on a charming enclosed patio shaded by flowers and overhanging trees. The food is the best in the city. For a light lunch, Juan suggests the excellent Mexican bacon and guacamole salad ($2); for dinner, succulent quail cooked in wine sauce, or the familiar Tampiqueña, a strip of tender sirloin served with beans, rice, avocado salad, and an enchilada ($2.75). The constant care that makes every customer feel important is supervised by Esther Aguilar, a diminutive, pleasant woman who visits your table, offering to solve any problem.
Behind and surrounding the outside patio are the motel rooms. Mrs. Crosby's is a first-rate inn, a romantic, graceful place to spend the weekend. Two people in one double bed: $7.05.
Mrs. Crosby's only culinary rival is Los Alpes, a motel and restaurant with nightclub and pool. It is the only other place to stay in Acuña. Dependable and more expensive than other Acuña restaurants ($6 sirloin compared with Crosby's $3.25), the 39 rooms are divided into the new section ($12.50 double) and old ($10.40 double). Manager Raphael Croker is a pleasant host, if you want a place to swim, eat, dance, and fall into bed, stay right here. To reach Los AIpes, go down the main street for three blocks and turn left for one mile.
La Macarina, owned by Julio Castillo, is located in town five blocks down the main street and one to the left. It appeals to beef eaters, dancers, and at 9:30 and 11:30, floorshow watchers. In season, the large patio is open and very nice. The food is consistently average. The floorshows are consistently terrible. The night I attended, the floorshow featured a dynamite double act—a fast talking emcee-magician and the clincher, two men performing ballet-like contortions on roller skates. Senor Castillo recommends for December, "Pepe and his College Girls," direct from Mexico City. Mondo Bizarro.
A nightclub-gift-shop-restaurant with genuinely good entertainment is the Colonial. The talent and the gifts are excellent. Eat elsewhere.
Some other Acuña attractions: Shangri La Bar. The overall color scheme and decor is Early Oriental Halloween: orange stalactites oozing from the ceiling; black walls with a 20-foot, fire-snorting dragon ridden by a, naked senorita closely resembling Olive Oyl. The dragon mural is ringed with small, blinking Christmas tree lights. Plastered over the wall behind the bar are hundreds of driver's licenses, class pictures, business cards, hunting licenses and notes…All Aggies call this number and ask for M." "Karena, we love you. Please call home." It's on the main street across from Lando's.
Lando's Bar and Curio Shop. The curio shop is expensive and so is the bar which is located below street level and is plush, with American prices and a band "every now and then," as the owner puts it.
El Mirador Restaurant and Bar. If you cross Amistad Dam into Mexico, El Mirador will be to the left. Their T-Bone is good; their filet isn't. The houses nearby were used by dam construction officials and now can be rented for $10 per bedroom, per day. They offer tennis, horseback riding, swimming and fishing. A nice Texas couple from Houston, Mr. and Mrs. Royce Showalter, operate "Safari Sports" out of the Mirador and will arrange hunting trips to nearby Texas or Mexican ranches.
The Mexican Kitchen. My friends T. J. and Judy Jarrett took me to this warm, busy place that serves distinctive Mexican food. Their specialty is the Chimichanga (a rolled flour tortilla two inches wide with indecently tender beef tucked inside.) They also have memorable flautas, homemade pralines on occasion. It's in Del Rio.
EAGLE PASS-PIEDRAS NEGRAS
STUFFED AS A STRASBOURG GOOSE, I sat in the dining room of the Restaurant Moderno enjoying the afterglow of a long dinner and talking with Tony Sanchez, San Antonio lawyer and fellow Mexican-food fancier. His bride of less than a year sat across from me. She is a beauty with hair and eyes dark as coal and a radiance that told me their honeymoon continued.
When talking Mexican food and Mexican restaurants, Sanchez doesn't merely make a statement. He speaks in edicts. His voice rings with papal authority: "There are four places on the border one must always go: The Drive Inn in Matamoros, the Cadillac Bar in Nuevo Laredo, Ma Crosby's in Acuña, and the Moderno in Piedras Negras." Case closed.
Certainly, there was no quarrel that night with Restaurant Moderno. Another border institution, the Moderno was founded in 1920 by a Chinese family under the name, Mexico Moderno. In 1943 the present owner, Rodolfo de los Santos bought the Cafe Moderno and it continues to be the gathering place for residents and tourists alike.
I had heard discouraging rumors recently that the Moderno's food had slipped in quality and that it survived only because its name had been well known for over 50 years. True or not, a new manager and chef were brought in six months ago by de los Santos. Miguel Bidault is a graduate of a Swiss hotel school; a former Holiday Inn manager in Acapulco; and before a tragic auto accident kept him in bed for over a year, he was slated to open a new Holiday Inn in Monte Carlo. Mr. Bidault brought with him his teacher-chef from Switzerland who can create any dish not listed on the menu.
The two men form a formidable team, and the results are excellent. A different specialty Monday through Friday has been added to an already exciting menu. On Sunday, an especially delicious Paella a la Valenciana is featured. On the regular menu Bidault praises the Duck L'Orange stuffed with wild rice, served with gravy, orange marmalade, and baked potato ($6). The Mexican plate (black beans and chalupa) is fine. Moderno's refried beans are unbeatable anywhere on the border.
The only discordant note comes from the band. The music is too loud, begins too early, and lasts too long. An awful mixture of Carlos Santana and Spike Jones, it drives on with the irritating monotony of a stuck auto horn.
Directly behind the Moderno is its only rival for excellent food in Piedras Negras, Restaurant Don Cruz. Owner Cruz Bernal was a former waiter at Mrs. Crosby's in Acuña and at the Moderno before he opened his own posh establishment several years ago. The Don Cruz menu is substantial but lacks the creativity of the Moderno. Senor Bernal suggests the Huachinango a la Veracruzana, which loosely translates to red snapper accompanied by bell peppers and onions. The music is acceptable and the steaks are passable.
Located on the corner of the Piedras Negras market, across the street from the Moderno, is Soloman's Cafe. Soloman's is a place of radiant warmth presided over by Jesus Abraham, who suggests the shish kebab marinated in red wine to his customers who drop in at noon.
Two doors down from the Moderno are the two best gift shops in town: Memo's and Riddle Curios, both owned by the Riddle family, one of the founding clans of Piedras Negras. On your left as you cross the bridge is En Los Rocas, a posh eat-and-dance emporium for the basic American tourist. You will realize all the deformities and amenities associated with identical gleaming palaces in Yankeeland.
LAREDO-NUEVO LAREDO
NUEVO LAREDO RANKS HIGH IN the catalog of Rogue Cities. A raw, vital bitch-hooker dressed in an evening gown and Frederick's of Hollywood bra, Nuevo Laredo rejects restraint and sobriety like an indigestible dumpling. A dope-smuggling center, a dope-murder center, ["The Laredo-San Antonio Heroin War," TM, August, 1973] it has the largest gathering of beautiful, low-priced prostitutes in North America. Laredo has none of that wearying middleclass restraint and poise found in some towns where the thought of spending more than a day would appeal only to the bedridden.
No one ever died of boredom here. No one comes here to begin the countdown of what some misguided metallurgists deemed, "the golden years." The quotidian bleat of the town urges you to eat, argue, drink, fornicate, laugh, spend, be happy.
Disturbers-of-the-peace, rockers-and-shakers, even Aggies lurch for the Cadillac Bar after paying the toll and crossing the bridge. Owner Porter Garner, Jr., is a Texas A & M graduate (class of '45), owns a new beige, four-door Mercedes-Benz (license number: "Aggie 1"), and has run the most widely-known restaurant on the border for 16 years. He has the good natured smiling face of a Friar Tuck and personifies the Cadillac's slogan, "Where old friends meet." As the ranchers and tourists begin to drift into the Cadillac's pleasant airy front room for dinner, Porter talks about this fabled institution:
"My father-in-law began working in New Orleans in 1903 as a bartender in all the old spots in the Vieux Carre. He was the last living bartender to work for Ramos of Gin Fizz fame, and he alone knew the original recipe.
"When prohibition wiped out business in New Orleans he came to Nuevo Laredo and opened the Cadillac on July 4, 1929. He wanted his place to be as prestigious, so it was christened, 'The Cadillac.' He retired in February, 1947, and I bought it from him that same year."
I noticed the menu read, "Home of the Famous New Orleans Gin Fizz," and wondered what happened to Ramos. "In 1949, we had a copyright fight with some folks in New Orleans and to avoid more trouble, changed the name. The recipe's still the Ramos original," said Mr. Garner.
Seafood is the house specialty, and the Cadillac serves the best in Nuevo Laredo. Porter suggests beginning with some of his turtle soup ($1), or shrimp a la Louisianne ($3) for an appetizer, followed by red snapper papillote ($3) , depending on your palate's preference. There is no dessert. A Porter Garner dictum, true to his city: "When a customer eats dessert, he tends to quit drinking."
One of the many similarities of Mexican border towns is the fact that one or two family dynasties dominate affairs. The Longorias are such a family in Nuevo Laredo. The family has prospered and contributed much to Texas-Mexican border life: banks, ranches, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs form part of the Longoria wealth. I walked with Alan Jackson from the Cadillac toward Fred and Dick Longoria's establishments: the Pub (bar); and the Lion's Den (nightclub). An insurance executive born in Laredo, Jackson is a man who quickly conveys a convivial, bacchic warmth.
He is half-Mexican and is as familiar with the language and the nuances of Mexico as he is with his own handwriting. We continued across the main avenue and down a warren of streets filled with pungent cooking odors and auto fumes, past an enormous Longoria mansion, until we reached The Pub. It is flanked on either side by the restaurant and nightclub. They are all connected and make up a compound of pleasure unique on the border.
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