The Fork grew up in Los Angeles and had many Mexican pals, therefore, we totally already knew that it celebrates the Mexican Army's unlikely victory against the French at the 1862 Battle of Puebla. But The Fork is also all about facilitating parties we can feel good about, so we called up a few friends and asked how they felt about the whole deal. Turns out, if you're not being racist (y'know, like a white person wearing a sombrero and fake mustache—which we've seen), they want you to party, too, even if most of them don't really think about Cinco de Mayo that much. Now, The Fork can only speak for the people they know, so please don't assume this is us acting like we're the authority figure on how ALL people feel about Cinco de Mayo. You can, however, think of some of the following things and maybe even do them? Let us know.
Margarita Trail
If you already knew, shut up, but if you didn't—we have a damn Margarita Trail here! For just a couple bucks, you can pick up a passport and then take it around to various restaurants, try their margaritas, get that bad boy stamped, revel in the glory. Also prizes. Seems like this week is a good one to start. In fact, if you follow @sfreporter and @theforksfr on Instagram, you may just get a little insight into how it works.
Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi
They're reopening their glorious patio on May 5 and they're offering special snacks and discounted margaritas—including one that has flavors of cucumber and watermelon. Holy moly!
La Fiesta Lounge at Hotel La Fonda
You guys, the hotels know how to do it, apparently, as we also discovered the fine folks at Hotel La Fonda have beer and cocktail specials plus jams from Cuban street music act Savor.
The Railyard
Everybody's favorite train track-adjacent park and plaza celebrates in style with art, live music, partying, more art, some other music, more partying and more. Put it on them calendars!
Also
-Usually we'd get into local stuff here, but we already did, so we're going to take a moment to talk about this pastry chef we saw on the incredible Netflix show, Chef's Table. His name is Jordi Roca and, like The Fork, he was a listless youth who didn't care for anything until he found his calling—totally effing bonkers desserts served at his brother's restaurant Ell Celler de can Roca in Girona, Spain. We definitely think y'all should take a look at the whole series, but this one in particular shows that desserts can be artistic and incredible, from tobacco-flavored ice cream cigars to a sweet version of Roca's nose. No joke. Pretty much this guy brought the restaurant to a three-star rating from Michelin. Say what? And though we couldn't find the specific clip we wanted, here's Roca in action:
More Tidbits
-Kicking off a totally fun road trip to some dumb music festival and blasting Katrina and the Waves while you're at it? You're gonna need snacks! Thankfully, Food & Wine has a list of the Do's and the Do-Not-Do's of road trip snacking.
-We wanted to one-up them, but it turns out there's already a Weird Snacks list on amazon. Sigh.
-And since we're talkin' Cinco de Mayo and all, seriouseats.com has a bevy of exciting recipes to try out to make it awesome over at your house.
-As for Rose Watch: 2018, Refinery 29 has a great breakdown of the best 2018 bottles to sample during the hotter months.
-Getting back to lists of things for a second, we stumbled upon this awesome list of 50 neat kitchen gadgets from bestproducts.com. We assume they're the best—otherwise they couldn't have the website address.
-Lastly, on this list of lists, we can't help but enjoy a good rundown of people who tried to make something they saw online and then failed miserably. Thanks, BuzzFeed!
Finally
Pizza thoughts kept rolling in, from the reader who thinks Upper Crust’s gluten-free pizzas aren’t very good (and too pricy) so they pick up Against the Grain frozen pesto pizza and gussie it up themselves to the reader who reminded us that Papa Murphy’s pizza is weirdly a lot better than you’d think it would be. Some readers were downright furious about our “eff Jimmy Buffett” comment, but we stand by that—even if he is more successful than us which, by the way, you can’t possibly know. Maybe The Fork is an eccentric billionaire whose long game was disparaging Jimmy Buffett in newsletter form. And if we are, then, like, mission accomplished, y’know?
A TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC BREAKDOWN OF THIS WEEK’S LETTERS
Number of letters received
26
Number of those we cared about
The continuing pizza tips ones
Most helpful tip of the week (not edited for content)
“I will like to send you my Donations for good work. Please advise. I find your from internet.”
Actually helpful tip of the week
“I still think you should eat cheese if you want.”
Number of times y’all ALMOST made The Fork Cry
A lot, but they were joy tears, so…
Number of readers who stuck up for Jimmy Buffett
Too many. Just … too many.
We wanna know where you go for cool treats to beat the summer heat. We also wanna apologize for that terrible rhyme. “Why didn’t you just delete it if you don’t like it, The Fork?”
….shut up.
We love you; we honestly love you,
The Fork
P.S.
