El Plátano: An Fresh Take on Latin Staple

When I was a kid, there were two staples to meals in our Cuban household :  rice and plantains.  There were very few exceptions to this rule.  Bread showed up sometimes, if there was any worth eating, and potatoes and pasta were occasionally mixed into our diet to shake things up a little.  However, no matter what the entree was, it was very probable that rice and plantains were to be served with it.  What I will focus on here, though, is the plantain.

Plantains are NOT bananas.  They are similar, but are quite different.  The thing is, you can fry a plantain.  You cannot fry a banana without it turning into a gloopy mess of disgusting proportions.  Yuck.  Fried plantains are the way to go.  They are very popular in many areas of Latin America, and can be fried to make tostones, which are twice fried and smushed plantain chunks; mariquitas, which are plantain chips; and maduros, which are fried chunks of ripened plantains.  The first two varieties result in something similar to fried potatoes in that they are not sweet, while the maduros are sweet (I just got really hungry as I typed this.  Go figure).

Anyways, now with this wonderful knowledge from Three Guys from Miami and Wikipedia, we can get onto what I want to talk about...

What is this?  This, my friends, was a pretty good idea.

This is what the North Raleigh restaurant Tacos and Tequila (I didn't choose the name) calls "El Plátano."  Basically, it is a whole fried ripe plantain sliced down the middle stuffed with pieces of steak, cheese, and a red paste topped with thinly cut lettuce over a bed of pinto beans.  Whew.  Try saying that five times fast.

Tacos and Tequila is a Mexican themed restaurant that is owned by a Colombian immigrant who wanted to bring the tastes of Latin America to North Raleigh, serving Mexican dishes with twists from other Latin American countries.

Overall, the ambience of the place is pretty cool.  There are pictures of famous Latinos (Frida Kalo, Sofía Vergara, Antonio Banderas, etc.) plastered all over the walls, and the salsa music, while out of place at a Mexican themed restaurant, gives the restaurant a nice celebratory vibe.  They make their own salsa, so depending on the day, it can be very spicy or not at all.  And the chips are pretty standard Mexican restaurant corn tortilla chips.

When I saw this dish on the menu, I was curious.  My love for plantains is abundant, but I was unsure as to how something like this would taste.  So I ordered it.  When it got to the table, I felt that it was almost too pretty to eat.  However, I don't have much self control when it comes to eating, so I promptly dug in.

It was pretty good.  Not fantastic, but good.  The plantain was nice and sweet, and with the steak, beans, and everything on top, it gave it an interesting, Tex-Mex flavor.  By themselves, the beans kind of lacked a ton of flavor, and the steak was a little on the chewy side (with told me that the quality of the meat wasn't the best), but the combination of the flavors is what made this dish really stand out to me.

Tacos and Tequila's "El Plátano" brought a vibrant set of flavors together that complemented the sweetness of the plantain quite nicely, and it wasn't that expensive either.  If you are ever in the area, give your taste buds a wake up call and try this out.