In the Mission District, a Great Cheap Lunch
- ️//topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/mark_bittman/index.html
- ️Mon Aug 14 2017
In the Mission District, a Great Cheap Lunch
Mark Bittman Produce for sale at a market in the Mission District.Greetings from San Francisco, where I am on a dual assignment, one an overdue visit to my younger daughter and the other for The Times’s Travel section. On Monday, while hanging out with the first and ignoring the second, we sprinted to the Mission for lunch.
I had my first real taste of Mexican food in San Francisco’s Mission district in, I think, 1968. (I remember cumin, lime, pork and tortillas — seems accurate enough, even if I’m not sure about the year!) I have no idea how many times I’ve been back since, but no trip to the most beautiful city in North America seems complete without at least a lunchtime dash down here.
Despite the rampant hipsterism, there are ways in which the Mission hasn’t changed much; markets and restaurants are the dominant storefronts, and, on Mission Street at least, there’s been little fancification. If I lived here I would spend half my shopping time in groovy farmer’s markets and the other half down here buying ultra-cheap fruits and vegetables.
One welcome change is that although there are still literally dozens of generic Mexican taquerias — mostly super-informal, ridiculously inexpensive, and pretty good — there are now a number of regional restaurants, also pretty informal, though many with sit-down service. On my daughter Emma’s recommendation, we ate at La Oaxaquena. She promised decent food and a banana-leaf tamale “as big as your face, filled with masa and chicken mole.”
It was all of that, and maybe bigger. The leaf was steamy hot when it arrived, the masa pale yellow, tender, and moist. The mole was negro, and delicious; spicy but not hot, rich, deep and complex, slightly sweet. We augmented this with some above-average guacamole, a good taco al pastor, a sope and a coconut agua fresca — the owner’s term, not mine — that was sweet enough for dessert. The bill for this meal for three was an almost astonishing $14-something. I’ll be back.
Not this time, though; sadly, that’s it. I can’t squeeze in another visit to the Mission’s Mexican scene on this trip, but next time I’ll remember that it deserves more attention.