Mexican cuisine

(In the first installment of a series, Che Underground: The Blog considers how a young San Diego show promoter became a Eugene, Ore., soup titan. Plus: a bonus after-party recipe from Mark! If you’d like your story told, e-mail cheunderground@gmail.com!)

The last time we were in the same town, you were playing in the Frame and promoting gigs in SD and Orange County at spots like Greenwich Village West, Big John’s and Club Cult. How did you move from there to the culinary arts?

I started at a steak-and-seafood joint as a dishwasher in Mira Mesa when I was in 10th grade, moved into doing salad station. There were all these “college” girl waitresses who would flirt with the new kid.

After that I got a job across the street at Chuck E. Cheese, doing pizza, and I would go out and do promos as the rat. My favorite was when they had me do an event for kids with Daryl Strawberry, then a Padre, who took me aside roughly when he thought I was upstaging him and whispered, “Take it easy, Chucky.”

(For Marcel Proust, the evocative taste of a madeline inspired seven volumes of childhood reminiscence. When in San Diego, Manual Scan/Lemons Are Yellow vet Paul Kaufman employs a different memory aid — this one wrapped in a tortilla.)
Now that I live 2,000 light years from home, I often crave the foods of San Diego. Certainly, the most distinctive cuisine of Southern California came across the border from Mexico. And it wasn’t until I moved to the SF Bay area in late ’82 that I realized that a few items in the Mexican food of my youth were not replicated 500 miles to the north.

For me, the chief example is the burrito. In San Diego, burritos had lively and very strong individual personalities: carne asada meant grilled steak, with some guacamole and onion, and that’s it. There was no confusing it with a burrito based on a chicken stew or machaca.

There to Here: Mark Stern, Soup Nation

El sabor de San Diego