Favorite Eating Places

I've been tagged by Dmarks, so I'm supposed to describe my five favorite restaurants.

Like a person could really narrow it down to five. Please. Maybe five categories. Or five kinds of food.


Let's see. A long time ago, in a town about 125 miles away, there used to be a Mexican food place called El Babos. I have no idea if I even spelled that right. It was probably the only Mexican restaurant that I went to as a kid. I like all kinds of Mexican food now, but nothing is quite as good as the memory of this place. The tacos had red shells. There were other kinds of tacos there, but the ones we ate were red. Mom used to order the guacamole there, and back then I did not eat guacamole, it just looked too weird. There was something else that we used to order there, but I don't even know what the thing was called. It was spherical and orange, probably a breaded and fried thing. It had a bunch of stuff inside held together with cheese, and there was another piece of cheese on top of the thing. I don't know what it was and I have never seen anything like it since. The restaurant was in Wichita Falls, and we moved away when I was eleven. The restaurant closed either in the late seventies or maybe the mid-eighties. There is still a Mexican restaurant in that building, but it isn't the same.

The Mexican food in New Mexico usually seems just a little different than the stuff in Texas. We like a place in the Mesilla area of Los Cruses. A place called La Posta has a room full of parrots. I think the place is closed on Mondays, and it seems like half the time we drive through the area it is on a Monday and we don't get to go.

Probably our favorite local Mexican place is Campo Verde in Arlington. It is filled with Christmas lights and has a miniature train up near the ceiling. Like most Mexican places, they serve chips and salsa, but they also serve queso and the chips have chili powder on them. I used to really not like beans, but they have a black bean soup with cilantro that I tried to copy. Someday when I have money I'm going to try the rattlesnake fajitas.

We might have a new favorite Mexican place now. We just discovered Abuello's last week. My husband really liked a soup he tried with lime and chicken. The regular salsa was excellent, and they also had a habanero salsa.



Also a long time ago in Wichita Falls was Fido's Pizza. It wasn't my favorite place at the time, cause the other kids went to Shakey's Pizza, but after we moved away I really missed it. The sausage pizza was covered with fennel seeds. I just thought that was what everyone did to sausage pizza, but I haven't seen that anywhere else. Once a great while I make it myself that way, but that really isn't the same either.

Speaking of pizza, we have been to Mystic Pizza twice. Like in the movie Mystic Pizza, in Mystic Connecticut. You wouldn't think that two people from Texas would end up at the same east coast pizza place two years in a row, but it somehow worked out that way. We had a basic pepperoni and sausage and everything on it usual kind of pizza one trip, and the next trip we had a weird seafood pizza. Both were good.

My husband really liked a pizza place in Omaha called Mi Casa or something like that, but I wasn't that impressed with it. I thought it was a lot like the pizza in box kits that we used to make.

Our favorite local pizza now is the white pizza at Pizza Sarajevo. I think that is in Carrollton, or maybe Addison. I had no idea why it is named that or if the owner is from there or if Sarajevo is known for it's pizza or what. We don't live near the place, but we used to get pizza there sometimes when my husband worked near there.


When we first started dating again, my husband and I liked a Chinese place called Jimmy Dips. It was our special place for a while. We were married for almost a year before my parents met his mom, and that was the place we took them. The place is closed now. I think it had something to do with widening the freeway or something. My husband once asked for sweet and sour pork to be made extra spicy. The lady taking our order corrected him, and said "sweet and sour pork is sweet and sour," but she brought him a side of chili sauce anyway. That's still one of our little jokes.

To be honest, almost any place with the words Chinese Buffet in the title has been my favorite restaurant at some point. Once we were going to eat at the place mentioned in the song Werewolves of London, but once we got there it either looked expensive or crowded, and we ended up eating in the basement next door. I have no idea what the name of the place was. Most of the stuff in the area had similar names to the place in the song, so if you didn't say the name carefully it sounded like you said something nasty.


I like just about any seafood place in Maine. Maine gets a bit weird with the lobsters. Every place seems to sell lobsters. In the summer you can get lobster rolls at McDonald's, but those probably aren't the best. Everything seemed to be "and lobsters" or "and seafood" in combination with other things that did not make sense. Like there was some tire place "and lobsters." People sell lobsters from pickup trucks in parks and on the side of the road.

There was someplace in Bar Harbor where we got a good lobster dinner for less than fifteen dollars. I don't remember the name of the restaurant, just that it was a short walk from most of the tourist stuff we were doing. I think it's called a shoreman's dinner if you have steamed lobster, steamed clams, corn on the cob, red potatoes, and blueberry pie. If you eat the same meal on the beach, it is called a clam bake. We didn't go on a clam bake because it cost like three times as much, and we probably would have gotten sick on the boat ride back.


My favorite barbecue place is K.C. Masterpiece in Kansas City. My husband and most people who really like barbecue places will disagree and vote for someplace where someone yells at you and then serves you nothing but meat and bread on some brown paper. Not me. I like a nice restaurant where they serve lighter things with the meat, like maybe a salad. Try to go at lunch, cause after that it gets real expensive.


I should probably stop now. Maybe I should tag David in D.C. We went on a tour of DC once, and they let us out in Georgetown for lunch, but the electricity had temporarily gone out in a lot of places and we just ended up at Uno's Pizza. David can tell us what we missed out on.

What do you think? Anyone else want to play?