Make Mine a Doble

You look up from the directions on your phone. Wait…what? Is this place in a mall?

Son. Of. A. Monkey!

I mean, don’t get me wrong: It’s a perfectly nice mall. It is, indeed, perhaps the fanciest mall we’ve ever set foot in (except maybe for that one in Sarajevo that saved our bacon when our rental car GPS failed and we couldn’t find our Airbnb due to the lack of street lights, street signs, and street names with vowels…but that’s a story for another day).

The point is, we didn’t come all the way to CDMX to eat in the shadow of the Abercrombie & Fitch.

And due to the treachery of that lying liar who lies (I’m looking at you, Google Maps), the place wasn’t even there, or maybe it changed its name to The Cheesecake Factory. O the irony of being denied the opportunity to officially reject the possibility of eating in the shadow of Abercrombie. A Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.

So we kept on walking.

This particular neighborhood was a strange mix of fancy-ass shopping mall with machine-gun-wielding mall cops in riot gear and full face masks, half on foot and half riding Segways (I kid you not), and, like…gas stations and convenience stores (and not the fancy-ass kind). In other words, no charming cantinas or taquerias to be found.

So we kept. On. Walking.

Wait. What was that across the intersection? Did I spy a dimly lit restaurant with mid-mod light fixtures and a sign featuring only two fonts? At this point, one of those fonts could have been Comic Sans and I’d still have dragged my hangry husband across the 8 lanes of traffic to snag a table and inhale whatever food was on offer.

When we approached the host stand and asked for “una mesa para dos, por favor,” the host asked for our name. “Oh, no reserva,” I said, apparently invisibly. The host looked past me and said, “No hay problema, we just like to write down your name.” And by “your name” he meant Mr. Hangry’s first name because #patriarchy!

Anyhoo, once he had written Mr. Hangry’s first name on a tiny slip of paper, he handed it to a server and muttered something I couldn’t quite catch–probably something about this dignified and impressively strong-looking American and his invisible but strangely noisy concubine.

Did I mention that in regular life we have different last names? That’s all well and good, but when we need to be fed, we are a unified front: Mr. & Mrs. Hangry.

FEEEEEEEEEED. MEEEEEEEE.

Wait, what? Goddamn QR code menu! Don’t make us tap things and scroll: We want the instant gratification of being able to see all of our options at once.

Thankfully, to keep us company as we explored the massive online menu, there was a petite cylindrical woven sleeve of house-made tortilla chips, some kind of warm bean situation, and four stone ramekins of salsa, each with its own tiny wooden spoon.

Eventually we found the cocktail section of the menu and each chose something that sounded delicious. The menu noted that the cocktails came in two denominations: Single (a particular number of milliliters for a particular price) and Doble (double the milliliters for approximately 1.5x the price of the single).

Obviously we ordered the doubles because our death march had left us rather parched and we need to do Wisconsin proud out there in the world.

Here’s what we were expecting: Delicious, appropriately proportioned (that is to say: large) boozy drinks.

Here’s what arrived: Delicious, appropriately proportioned (that is to say: large) boozy drinks.

Great! No hay problema, right? I mean, the drinks were tasty! And strong! Nothing to see here, right?

Well, things got weird after Mr. Hangry finished his drink, before our food arrived.

Suddenly our solicitous waiter appeared at his elbow with…another cocktail. There had been no inquiry as to whether a second cocktail would be welcome. Yet here was a second cocktail. It felt presumptuous, if not scam-adjacent.

Whatever, man. The drink is here, we surely will be charged for it, but it was tasty, so…when in Rome, amiright? Drink ’em if you got ’em!

Fast-forward to the end of our meal. I’d been nursing my cocktail and refused multiple times to let the waiter take it away, saying what I hoped was “I’m not finished yet” but was probably closer to “I’m not dead yet” or possibly “I will stab you if you try to take away my drink.”

Finally I downed the last drop of my cocktail, or more accurately, finally I reached the point where the structural integrity of my paper straw gave out and I needed to call it quits. I relinquished my death grip on my cocktail vessel and sat back while we waited for the bill.

A few minutes later our waiter arrived carrying not the expected check presenter but…you students of foreshadowing surely saw this coming…A SECOND GODDAMN COCKTAIL.

After some awkward pantomime and even more awkward conversational ships passing in the night due to our mutual language barrier, we all agreed that I should sit back, relax, and drink my second goddamn cocktail.

Which is exactly what I did, still convinced that when la cuenta arrived, we would be charged for four cocktails. Mr. Hangry was convinced that would not be the case–that we were NOT being scammed, but rather we had entered some bizarre universe in which ordering “a double” meant you wanted two identical cocktails, separated by an hour and a bunch of food.

Imagine my delight and surprise when he turned out to be right!

Above: Remnants of warm bean situation

Above: Remnants of totoabo and grilled romaine

Above: My drink came with its own little nest and tree stump. Um, okay!