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Latin America's 36th Best Restaurant is the beauty to Guadalajara's beast

Latin America's 36th Best Restaurant is the beauty to Guadalajara's beast

Escamoles, or ant eggs, on a puree of cauliflower and parsnip, course four at Alcalde Without a doubt the jewel piercing the otherwise linty outie bellybutton of Mayor Alfaro’s recently-christened “gastronomic corridor” (being a collection of restaurants dotting Avenida Mexico between the perpetually congested Lopez Mateo and Golfo de Cortes roundabouts), Restaurante Alcalde is also a headliner on the city’s capacious culinary scene as a whole - perhaps its chief attraction,

Samadhi Cafe: Haven for the beer-obsessed teutonophile

Samadhi Cafe: Haven for the beer-obsessed teutonophile

When your first opportunity to eat currywurst is inside a massive, drafty suburban shopping mall in Guadalajara, Mexico, you may found yourself meditating upon the un-predictable ways the strands of our complex human universe are interwoven. Also, reflections on the au courant issue of cultural appropriation may occur, being that this dish (an already Frankenstein-esque German street food staple created by a Berliner housewife using local sausage, ketchup, and curry powder c

Diamonds in the rough: Street art in Guadalajara

Diamonds in the rough: Street art in Guadalajara

Work by artists Peque vrs and Pwoz Mac, calle Morelos and Roja Gonzalez In case you hadn’t heard, art imitates life, which is no less true for being a tired old cliche. Oaxaca City’s street art, for instance, so troublingly resembles reality that authorities regularly paint over political murals as part of “civic beautification.” Thus, a visitor to the colonial southern capital who knows something of her history of resistance and conflict might be surprised to see so much un

The tattoo artist as healer

The tattoo artist as healer

Sitting in the sun-lit office of Chapultepec-adjacent tattoo shop Chamuca at three in the afternoon, owner and artist Rodrigo Ruiz related an anecdote which may serve to give nuance to the perception still held by a minority, that of tattoo artists as untrustworthy occupants of the squalid depths of society’s lower strata. “I had a guy come in,” Ruiz told the Reporter, “who was burned as a child, leaving a scar all over his chest and entire left arm. Every time he would go to

"Gastronomic Corridor" or the mayor's poorly polished turd?

"Gastronomic Corridor" or the mayor's poorly polished turd?

Mayor Alfaro (center) holding forth during COME's inauguration in October Upon completion of an examination of Guadalajara’s newly minted “COME, Gastronomic Corridor” on two separate occasions, that sobriquet - applied by Mayor Alfaro and a consortium of local business owners to a somewhat drab stretch of Avenida Mexico sandwiched between two giant roundabouts - seemed like a linguistic swindle, a coat of paint perfunctorily applied to a brothel outhouse. However, this dubi

Casa Luna in Tlaquepaque: Feast for the eyes, some good leftovers for the tongue

Casa Luna in Tlaquepaque: Feast for the eyes, some good leftovers for the tongue

Nothing fogs up the windscreen of the critical faculties like having within arm’s reach an eight-foot-tall tree (fake, but made of real wood) jutting up from the center of your table, decorated all over with small plastic bottles of Patron tequila. Even less conducive to forming a clear-eyed appraisal of a restaurant’s pluses and minuses is having a stream of un-aged agave spirit etch a path down your esophagus vis-à-vis a burnished steel luge wielded by a giggling waitress.

Annual Guadalajara livestock fair a fecund onslaught for the senses

Annual Guadalajara livestock fair a fecund onslaught for the senses

Guadalajara’s Expo Ganadero, an annual livestock fair and competition running from October 5 to November 2, is for the first-time attendee a bewildering overload of several of the cardinal senses. First and foremost is smell: the Aegean stables have nothing on the effluvia that is constantly being emitted by the fair’s furry, feathered or otherwise clad captive organisms. Sound came in second, with the grunt and lo of cattle, blaring banda music and yowling children creating

Nueve Esquinas: Guadalajara's Birria Mecca

Nueve Esquinas: Guadalajara's Birria Mecca

There’s a typewriter repair shop on Calle Libertad one block north of Plaza Nueve Esquinas. Peering into its gloomy interior, the eye slowly adjusts, revealing a massive heap of mechanical typewriters stacked at odd angles about 8-foot high, stopping just two feet shy of scraping the ceiling. Out of the middle of this forlorn heap of black, brown and beige obsolescence peers a small, rumpled man in late middle-age with the mien of a drowsy koala. Jose de Jesus Hernandez Mez

The glorious excess of modern mariachi

The glorious excess of modern mariachi

Two weeks ago, I covered the Traditional Mariachi Festival and was impressed by its participants’ adherence to an older - and less popular - tradition of mariachi. And because I’m a journalist dedicated to giving all perspectives their day in court, I faithfully covered the subsequent festival, the International Festival of Mariachi and Charreria - but only the free events so as to maintain my allegiance with the hoi polloi. Fortunately - and to the organizers’ credit - the

Merchants in Guadalajara's Centro Historico need tram line construction to end

Merchants in Guadalajara's Centro Historico need tram line construction to end

For the last few decades, Guadalajara’s heart has been slowly hemorrhaging its inhabitants in all cardinal and inter-cardinal directions - a one-way circulatory system which neglects to pump oxygenated blood back into its most important organ. Construction for the number three subway line along Alcalde/Septiembre 16 has only worsened the problem, pinching off pedestrian traffic on and around said avenue that would normally have sustained its commerce. But the economic devast

The Jalisco Jazz Festival: proselytizers of improvised music

The Jalisco Jazz Festival: proselytizers of improvised music

On a cool evening on the roof terrace of a snazzy Zapopan mall complex ringed by the soaring husks of new construction, a month and change of jazz-related events in Guadalajara both educational and diversionary came to a head in five hours of live music, speechifying and canapes. The Jalisco Jazz Festival is the result of what must be a herculean effort on the part of non-profit Fundacion Tonica and its founders, Gil Cervantes and Sara Valenzuela, who founded the organization

A celebration of national, corporate brotherhood at the U.S. Consular July 4th fete in Guadalajara

A celebration of national, corporate brotherhood at the U.S. Consular July 4th fete in Guadalajara

The American Consulate celebrated its parent country’s independence from the U.K. inside the massive convention hall of a technical school on the northwest outskirts of Guadalajara, Friday, June 30. Tecnologia Monterrey Campus GDL, which dangles from the southern edge of a large air base, was heavily fortified for the event, with multiple checkpoints manned by grave-faced officials with clipboards and several security details bristling with high-tech weaponry - all hired to p

Annual Fiesta de la Musica: A showcase for Guadalajara's polyglot music scene

Annual Fiesta de la Musica: A showcase for Guadalajara's polyglot music scene

The stylistic breadth in evidence at last Sunday’s Fiesta de la Musica, an annual multi-stage affair in Guadalajara, seemed to warrant optimism regarding the state of the city’s music scene, specifically as it concerns its eclecticism and heterogeneity. That vigor was exemplified by two bands, each teasing Parque Agua Azul’s sultry air with two very disparate sonorities: electro cumbia and shoe gaze/noise rock. Guadalajara’s annual Fiesta de la Musica - modeled after an even

Via Libertad, agent of rebirth or lame gentrifier?

Via Libertad, agent of rebirth or lame gentrifier?

Astute observers of urban milieus, be they dilettantes or professional urbanists, can’t have failed to noticed the proliferation in the past few years of a specific trope which could be described as a haute bourgeois mutation of the classic suburban strip mall, within whose confines are found, say, a collection of boutiques, a variety of vendors hawking whichever foods are currently the “hotness” (Korean tacos, pork belly bao, fried ants), and a couple of expiatory temples of

Guadalajara's tianguis cultural: handicrafts, Hot Wheels, moshpits and tacos

Guadalajara's tianguis cultural: handicrafts, Hot Wheels, moshpits and tacos

According to two dispassionate, bored teenagers manning a t-shirt stall, the tiangius cultural next to Parque Agua Azul has been going down every Saturday for about 30 years. That’s a lot of matchbox cars and spiked dog collars. In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a tianguis cultural is simply an open-air market where all and sundry is available. At the iteration just outside one of Guadalajara’s largest urban parks, offerings include native handicrafts, Star Wars f

A bait-and-switch scam puts a dent in churches' coffers

A bait-and-switch scam puts a dent in churches' coffers

Base criminality? Poetic justice? Whichever way you might lean, it’s safe to assume that the mitered grandees of the Archdiocese of Guadalajara are none too pleased by a recent spate of stealth thefts by brazen, (one assumes) less-than-faithful, parishioners. It’s a scam so simple as to incite envy: place a fake bill of considerable monetary weight - say, one valued at 200 pesos - in the collection plate and take out however much change you see fit. The perpetrator comes aw

Taking the pulse of Guadalajara's jazz scene at an urban park on Sunday

Taking the pulse of Guadalajara's jazz scene at an urban park on Sunday

At first it seemed like butterflies might end up outnumbering human spectators at this past Sunday’s concert celebrating International Jazz Day. But it was only 2 p.m. The event, organized by the city and consisting of a single stage set up on a short, brood flight of steps below the giant spherical cage that is Toktli, a local band fusing jazz with Son Jarocho Parque Agua Azul’s butterfly conservatory, eventually drew a he

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