Casa México

After a week of work, gym and lazing around home, the Friday evening arrives full of expectation. Most of the time you plan a lot and end up doing what you always do, sometimes you do something very different and end up regretting you didn’t do the same old. Sometimes change is all you need. Change and heavy Mexican food.

Casa México is a little restaurant in Av. D. Carlos I in Lisbon dedicated entirely to the Mexican theme. It’s not tacky though. It’s really cozy and nice, apart from being a bit cold and drafty in the winter, but once again, this is a place in Lisbon, not in Scandinavia, so don’t ever expect warm interiors. The service is very nice, not as helpful as most of the people like, but not servile and overly present. Honestly, don’t we all hate having a waiter around all the time in a restaurant leaving you no space and time between courses and no opportunity to say to our company what a pain he/she is? Well in Casa México you won’t have that. But you might not have your beer arriving as fast as you would like either. What you will have is a wonderful margarita to start with, or you think it’s to start with but the drink is so big that will last through your entire meal, and you won’t mind because it goes perfectly with all the heavy food you are about to experience. They also do other fruit margaritas but in drinks I normally like the old classics and I hate tequila that tastes like juice.

The little tapas they bring to the table in the beginning are delicious. There’s a fresh tomato salsa, kind of hot but not too much with really good mixes of herbs, onion and spices (I think I recognized some coriander and cumin in it). That salsa and their guacamole that we ordered for starter are wonderful and some of the best I have ever tried too.

The mains were as good as everything else. Very authentic food. Not that I’m a great connoisseur of what should Mexican food be, but I imagine that should be something consistent, simple, full of spicy and hot flavors and good ingredients, like all other sorts of food should have too, as opposed to little cubes of tasteless chicken fried and served in a depressing dish with some crappy sauces on top, extremely colorful to bring the Mexican feeling but making it as blunt and boring as food can be. That is normally what I got serve in most of the Mexican restaurants I have ever tried in Europe. Except for this one.

I loved this place the first time I have ever been there alone with my bonitão* in one of our “no friends available in Lisbon” Friday nights. This last night we went with Katy and Tom and was as good as last time. The service this last time was a bit worse. Lack of inspiration to deal with the public maybe, anyway, there were couple of things that were quite annoying, like the horrible time waiting for a draft beer or not having cards payment. Apart from that, food was wonderful again and this time we even manage to keep T from ruining our orders and mixing them up with the waiters, cause of his very authentic British accent or his very authentic English man Portuguese.

* handsome

Casa México Website

I leave also a Margarita Recipe but I advise you to not use sugar and put salt on your glass rim.