El Señorial And A Lesson Learned

Around this time last year I noticed sudden rumblings of a restaurant on Milwaukee's south side by the name of El Señorial. Those tremors quickly became a full on mania-quake, the aftershocks of which delivered me and a few curious friends to the door of El Señorial for a late night dinner.

The evening was a fateful one for me as it drastically changed the way I've gone about dining. I went in to the restaurant with the knowledge that El Señorial was famous for a few dishes, most notably their parrilladas. A combination of arrogance, entitlement and idiocy persuaded me to ignore the advice of my hedonistic brethren and go with the strategy I always implemented as a first time diner in an establishment: go with the fundamentals. To be fair, I only went with what I perceived to be the fundamentals, forgetting entirely that perhaps, just maybe, this deeply authentic Mexican restaurant, who's clientele are primarily Mexican people, doesn't give a shit about what I qualify as a "fundamental" Mexican food experience.

The result of my sloppy ordering was a forgettable and poorly prepared taco plate, replete with cold beans and rice. I left in a whiny huff, convinced that all of my friends had either pulled some elaborate prank on me despite not knowing one another, or that they didn't know a damn thing about food. There's that arrogance I mentioned again. After writing some jejune status update detailing my disdain, I got quite the lashing from several of my friends informing me that it wasn't the restaurant that had fucked up, it was me. I took a step back and considered my actions, which led to the dismissal of my faulty and misinformed "fundamentals" policy. I could have very easily reeled in to some existentialist crisis where I chronicled and criticized my ordering process for every meal I've ever had. Now that I'm married and have found content in the realm of romance, food has become my pursuit of choice when I want to instill my life with excitement. Could El Señorial be the one who got away? It came very close to that, but luckily fate intervened.

I was getting off of work a couple Saturdays ago when some married friends of mine contacted me asking if I wanted to stop by (the magnificent) Red Light Ramen for dinner. Usually i'd emphatically leap at the opportunity to get some midnight ramen, but there were a lot of things in the way this time. First: I had already gotten ramen in two consecutive weeks, Second: I had just gotten off a shift that had kicked my ass and I wasn't sure I could endure waiting in a line for dinner, but the big one is that I had already said the words "Mexican food" to my wife, so anything else may as well be "poisoned garbage" as far as our options were concerned. We bounced around a few more ideas before I almost unconsciously uttered the words "El Señorial", and just like that, our destination was set.

The husband in tow was one of the ones who more sternly criticized my initial ordering behavior, so with that and his enviable dining repertoire in mind I did the unthinkable... I handed over the helm of my dinner to my friends for the evening. We started with the requisite free chips and beers. I hate the idea of patronizing anyone who reads this with the details of ordering a generic Mexican beer, but the fact that they came with humongous frosted mugs with salted rims feels worth mentioning. We ordered a few other things that feel ornamental in comparison to our main dish; an incredible side of arbol sauce that I can say without hesitation was the best of my young life, and about a fifteen pound plate of chilaquiles which were sort of ordered "just because", but then we got down to the real deal, the reason for our whole journey, the pièce de résistance: the parrilladas.

Objective, indisputable excellence.

From the little I've been able to ascertain from the internet, parrillada has several different incarnations. The one placed before us was a truly majestic heap of ribs, flank steak and chorizo, along with peppers, onion and potatoes cut lengthwise. Imagine some sort of evolved and nearly holy version of fajitas and that's what this was. I don't mean to use the word holy to come off as lofty or to be disrespectful either. What I mean to say is that what I ate at El Señorial at 1:30 in the morning a few Sundays ago was so close to perfection for that moment that it gave me pause and made me lament my mortality. To know that there are a finite amount of moments in anyone's life like the one I was having saddened me, but also inspired me in to a state of very real gratitude. I was thankful for what I was consuming, who I was with, and the reminder that being humbled can lead to great things. Usually if I'm awake at 1:30 in the morning I'm busy destroying memories instead of creating them, but that dinner was unforgettable.

Our ride home was filled with a wonderful delirium. Incidentally the last time I'd experienced anything like it was around the eleventh course of my dinner at Alinea. Stuffed with food and starved for sleep we parted ways. My wife and I made our way home. My wife and I attempted our nightly routine of nostalgic television and a beer, but I was no match for the sheer amount of mixed meats crushing my system. I fell asleep on the couch, beer in hand, so grateful to have been so wrong.

El Señorial
1901 S 31st St, Milwaukee, WI 53215
(414) 385-9506
Make it happen.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Maybe it's some sort of mental dysmorphia but I live in a constant state of self doubt. I feel like I'm treading on a thin strand of luck and the slightest of circumstances could buffet me off the rope in to the abyss I deserve to live in. This isn't to suggest I believe I've done something cosmically immoral, but it is to say that I'm presently living a life I have a hard time accepting I'm worthy of. I have a job that is actually fun to go to, I have an insistently loving and supportive family, I have enough money to sustain the maintenance of two dogs who I adore and enough extra to manage a date night here and there. My wife is the loyal, sweet, incisive and hilarious breadwinner of my house who puts up with my neurotic bullshit with more patience than I had previously assumed was possible. That doesn't even touch on her beauty, which exists on such a scale that otherwise mature and tactful adults who meet her for the first time feel compelled to tell me they don't understand how I, of all people, ended up with her. The life surrounding this teeth-gritting, fatalistic, catastrophic curmudgeon is by definition a good one; one that could be categorized as enviable for a lot of people

So what's my stupid problem then? Well, I'm so nervous about the fragility of my very nice life that instead of enjoying it I become a hypochondriacal wad of nervous energy. I consider the logic of doomsayers predicting the end of the world, I convince my body it has cancer or some anomalous neurological condition, I remind myself constantly that at any minute someone I love could die in a car accident and joy itself could become rendered an impossibility forevermore. In short, my last name is "Ciaccio" and I am imbued with a genetic condition that makes me, at times, a grumpy and petulant old man who loves life too much to invest in it. Caution begets anxiety which begets self doubt which begets depression which begets me sitting around and playing my PS3 for hours instead of doing anything remotely useful, like cleaning up my house or writing on this here blog. It's lame and inexcusable. That's why I'm sorry.

I'm not sorry to you, my reader, whoever you are. I'm really grateful that you've tolerated my indulgent self-effacement long enough to get to this sentence, but I'm not sorry. I'm also not going to apologize to myself because my inner snob resents my inner sloth too much to let me get away with contrition. I dedicate my lament to the static sense of fulfillment that I've been shutting out the last several months by looking at my laptop and saying, "Why bother?". Knowing that I've exchanged something I personally find enriching for hours and hours of forgettable non-life isn't something I want to apologize to myself for, but it is something I want to regret. Even if life isn't as fragile as my brain would like me to believe, time itself is a non-renewable resource.

So here is this post, in all of it's immodest and maudlin glory, obliging me to keep writing. There may be a lot in this world that I thumb my nose at, but food and writing don't fit in to that vast bracket. Whatever this blog is the product of; be it a talent, a gift, a delusion or whatever else, it is with out a doubt a more logical means to a satisfying end than all of the nothing i've been doing. So, with Wisconsin's pertinacious winter looming, let's get cozy, and I'll fill some of your time with what I think about the great (and not so great) world of gustation.