We found nothing but tourist traps on our first night in Santa Fe, but the second day was a success, thanks to Grover’s friend Andy Biggs. Andy is a wildlife photographer (www.andybiggs.com) who lives in Santa Fe.
“You’ve got to go to Maria’s Cantina,” he said. “They have an amazing tequila selection.”
Grover and I went to Santa Fe last week and we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to see what New Mexico has on Old Mexico in terms of tequila.
I was dreaming of great New Mexican cuisine, accented with fully stocked tequila bars, but the reality was somewhat different. If the food was good, there was no decent tequila in sight, and if the tequila was good, the food was just mediocre.
I wasn’t always an obnoxious tequila snob. Nope. In my earlier days, I was a beer-drinking, hot-dog-eating, 8-track-tape-owning “guy behind the camera” photojournalist. I worked as a staff photographer for newspapers in Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, New York, and Minnesota.
Last weekend – Valentine’s Day, in fact – we stopped by a restaurant/bar in the moneyed seaside town of Sausalito, Calif. to have a drink. The bar didn’t have a great selection of tequila, but it did have a handful of nice choices, such as Don Julio 1942, Casadores
When I was 31 years-old, I had my first-ever taste of an avocado. It was on the same day I first ate sushi. Today, these are some of my favorite things in life. It took a while, but I finally caught on.
Somewhere in my 39th year, sitting in the back of Tommy’s Mexican Restuarant in San Francisco, I had my first real tequila experience. Scarlet just moved into town, and a group of friends walked to the famed San Francisco tequila destination, just around the corner from her apartment.
This is not just a blog about tequila – the delicious, potent elixir that soothes whatever ails you – it is also a blog about the tequila lifestyle, or more accurately, the Mexican lifestyle. Some of us in the U.S. may have a limited view of Mexico from what we’ve see in border towns or at Disneyfied beach resorts, but in the heart of the country, in the real Mexico, there’s a real passion for life, for music, for family and for laughter. This is the tequila lifestyle – taking time at the end of the day to appreciate what really matters. And what better way to do it then with a caballito of fine tequila?