Mexican Restaurant Poll

[mr.yuck]

Do your Mexican restaurants where ever you are serve their free chips with both salsa and white sauce?

 

Participation is required

[LUGR]

What the fuck is white sauce? Ranch? Queso? Naw, that’s extra.

 

We get a couple of types of red or green sometimes. Red is the standard for the frees.

[Dark_Knight]

I got some white sauce you can dip your chips in, big boi

 

 

 

 

no homo tho

[mr.yuck]

Sorry. I should clarify. White sauce is like Mexican ranch.

[LUGR]

2 hours ago, mr.yuck said:

Sorry. I should clarify. White sauce is like Mexican ranch.

Yeah, that sounds like some regional shit you be getting at your local Applebees on taco Tuesday.

[One Man Banned]

Anywhere I've ever been anywhere pretty much offers red and green sauce.  Some Mexican dude been serving you salsa de pinga.

[LUGR]

Naw, this salsa fresca de pinga @mr.yuckenjoys is definitely regional, and not the norm in my region.

[ndv]

3 hours ago, mr.yuck said:

Do your Mexican restaurants where ever you are serve their free chips with both salsa and white sauce?

 

Participation is required

 

Yes and No, as thus depends in the restaurant here where I am at.  I have been to a few the do serve the red and white, (white not as in queso) its some type of mild sauce similar to the red but has a slight coconut flavor, (think more so tropical).  It's pretty good actually. 

 

But the majority rather its tex-mex or authentic, usually serve both red and green, which is all you can eat and free.   As for the queso, this is usually ordered as an appetizer.  However, I do believe I have been to a Mexican restaurant once that did serve the red sauce and white cheese, but when I say white cheese, I mean warn mozzarella, the food wasn't impressive compared to other authentic restaurants I gave been to so I forgot all about it until this thread.  

 

Here in houston there are so many tex-mex and authentic restaurants that the tex-mex pretty much taste the same.  But the authentic places is where different areas of Mexico you taste that side of the region and how it's made does slightly differ which goes to say there is also a slight difference in how regoings serve food.  Some places just offer red sauce, some places offer both red and green and each also comes with spice levels as well.  But to answer your question, No.  

Edited October 8, 2022 by ndv

[KILZ FILLZ]

Roja, verde, I’d you’re lucky chipotle (brown not orange)

[morton]

The story of white sauce, Virginia's unique contribution to Mexican American cuisine

By Matthew Korfhage

PilotOnline.com

•

May 03, 2019 at 10:30 am

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Salsa and white sauce at El Azteca in Norfolk. White sauce, or "salsa blanca," is a Virginia contribution to Mexican-American cuisine whose versions were first made at El Toro and Plaza Azteca restaurants in Norfolk and Virginia Beach. (Matthew Korfhage)

Sit down at a family-style Mexican restaurant in southeastern Virginia, and chances are you will be served a mysterious white sauce unknown in Mexico.

The dipping sauce has no name except "white sauce," or "salsa blanca," and it was, by all accounts, invented in Hampton Roads.

It comes free with your basket of tortilla chips, alongside standard tomato salsa, and it is so popular that old-school Mexican American restaurants can live or die by the quality of their version.

"If we walk into a Mexican restaurant and they don't serve white sauce, we turn around and leave," says Lee Tolliver, a reporter at The Pilot and a Hampton Roads native.

 

The sauce is a little like ranch dressing, except fuming with garlic and spice. And it is delicious — in the way that onion dip is delicious.

But if you travel much more than 100 miles from Norfolk, it becomes rare. Aside from a few pockets of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic, it's served almost nowhere else in North America except Virginia and northern North Carolina.

"I used to travel a lot for work," recalls Theresa Magyar, a Norfolk fan of the sauce. "I'd ask for white sauce in other parts of the country and they'd look at me like I had two heads! I finally figured out that it was a local — wonderful — delicacy."

Manuel Vasquez serves the white sauce at his restaurant, Costa del Sol, in Windsor. He also served it when he ran a location of local Mexican chain Plaza Azteca in Suffolk. But he'd never encountered it before moving here from New York 15 years ago.

"We can say this is originally from Virginia. Other states don't have it," Vasquez says. "Where it came from? Who started making it? A lot of people, including Mexican people, have that question, too. But we make it. We have to have it, because the people come in and ask for white sauce. They need it."

The sauce, as it turns out, is entirely homegrown.

 

The former El Toro location on Diamond Springs Road in Virginia Beach. (Patty Jenkins)

 

In the 1970s in Norfolk, when you went out for Mexican food, you went to El Toro. The restaurant was open in the '60s and became a phenomenon in the '70s, when it was taken over by Willie Jenkins, a large-framed man with dyed red hair and a personality described by former employees as both gruff and generous.

"He didn't really take any guff. He had a harsh attitude," says Sharon Mason Barish, who "pretty much grew up at El Toro" when her mother worked there in the 1970s.

At the time, the restaurant at 3574 N. Military Highway was the only Mexican restaurant in Hampton Roads, says Dana Smith-Clifton, whose mother was a waitress there for 25 years. Smith-Clifton also took a job there.

"On Fridays and Saturdays people would be lined up all around the building," Smith-Clifton remembers.

"When he opened El Toro, he struck a gold mine. They were always busy, I don't care what day of the week," Barish says.

Early on, says Smith-Clifton, no one working at the restaurant actually came from Mexico, but it was the only Mexican food many here knew. The restaurant became famous for its enchilada and red sauces, and its simple take on nachos — just white cheese and jalapenos melted over halved taco shells.

But, especially, El Toro became famous for its white sauce.

That signature item began not as a chip dip, but as a salad dressing.

"We served it in the same cups as the salsa," Smith-Clifton says. And over the course of a decade, the sauce slowly migrated from the lettuce to the tortilla chips. Eventually, she says, they just started serving it as a free salsa alongside the traditional red salsa.

Smith-Clifton believes the sauce predates Jenkins' time there, to the bar's original owners. But Barish said Jenkins called it an old family recipe, and kept it like a state secret.

"My mother worked there seven days a week," Barish says. "They never divulged the recipe to her."

Barish eventually got the recipe from a family member who worked there. The secret ingredient turned out to be plain-old Miracle Whip salad dressing, mixed with milk, cumin, oregano and crushed red peppers.

 

A handwritten recipe for "Willie's White Sauce," the version of white sauce served at El Toro restaurant in Norfolk in the 1970s. This recipe was obtained by Sharon Mason Barish, whose family worked at the restaurant. (Courtesy Sharon Mason Barish)

 

"The Miracle Whip came in big jugs," Smith-Clifton says. "We made up spices in bags like newspapers used to come in when it was raining. We made the spices up, then layered in the spices  — that whole bag went into them jugs  — then we just stirred and stirred. Then the white sauce had to sit for at least 48 hours. You could eat it right off, but then it wasn't as spicy as it needed to be."

When Jenkins sold El Toro's original location in 1990, the sauce passed on to Paul "Pappy" Gibson, a former state magistrate who called the place Pappy's Hacienda. El Toro had by then opened two more locations in Virginia Beach, and both have closed. But the white sauce lived on in other restaurants in Hampton Roads.

The white sauce might have become just a fond memory if it weren't for a group of Mexican American restaurateurs who moved to Virginia Beach in 1995.

When Miguel Lopez, Jesus Torres, and Ruben and Raul Leon opened the first location of local Mexican restaurant chain Plaza Azteca on Holland Road in February 1996, the region still had only a few Mexican restaurants. The partners were experienced restaurateurs, with numerous Mexican restaurants throughout the American south.

 

One of the three original Plaza Azteca locations at 4292 Holland Road in Virginia Beach, which opened in 1996 in a smaller building at the same location. The local chain is largely responsible for making white sauce a standard accompaniment to tortilla chips at Mexican-American restaurants in Hampton Roads. (Matthew Korfhage)

 

When they opened here, they found a Virginia Beach dining populace primed to ask for white sauce with their tortilla chips.

Plaza Azteca general manager Ronald Martinez says the Azteca white sauce is not based on El Toro's, though Miguel Lopez "may have tried some other people's sauces."

(Edit: May 31, 2019: Apparently Azteca's white sauce was indeed based on El Toro's recipe, according to Lopez's family and former partners)

Lopez brought a distinctly Mexican sensibility and set of ingredients to his sauce, stemming from his roots in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. For Plaza Azteca, white sauce was a way to stand apart from other Mexican restaurants, and also a lower-cost alternative to offering queso dip.

"We experimented with salad dressing," Martinez says. "We mixed in jalapenos, milk, crushed peppers, fresh onions. Miguel took two months to get the right balance." Eventually, he says, "nobody asked for the red salsa. Everybody asked for the white salsa."

The sauce's base is a mixture of milk and a "plain salad dressing." Unlike El Toro, Plaza Azteca serves their white sauce immediately after it's made, with both fresh and canned jalapenos and a secret weapon to punch up the sauce's heat and brightness: a little spicy brine from the La Costeña jalapeno cans. Azteca also uses fresh garlic, as opposed to the garlic powder used at El Toro.

"We sometimes make it two times a day," Martinez says.

Today, the Plaza Azteca group is a juggernaut, with more than 60 restaurants, most of them in Virginia and others in North Carolina and the mid-Atlantic. And wherever Plaza Azteca went, the sauce followed, leading to small white-sauce pockets in cities outside of Virginia.

Even if the sauce didn't start in Mexico, it's now served there, Martinez says. "Families of the owners, they visited from Jalisco, and they took the sauce back. They don't sell it, but they serve it to their families. They make it for festivals."

Part of the reason that white sauce has taken hold in Hampton Roads is that so many of the region's Mexican American restaurateurs got their start working for Plaza Azteca.

"Nobody has the original recipe. So everyone makes their own versions," says Costa del Sol's Vasquez, who says nostalgic former customers have asked him to mail his white sauce away to Texas, where it doesn't exist.

Some people use onions in their sauce, he says, some don't. Some use milk and water in different mixtures. Some add coriander. Even different Plaza Azteca locations, he says, seem to have developed their own evolutions of the sauce.

Smith-Clifton says the white sauce served at El Azteca at 1522 E. Little Creek Road in Norfolk is the closest she's found to El Toro's.

Ernesto Alonso, who now owns Plaza del Sol in Norfolk's Ghent neighborhood, encountered the sauce for the first time when he moved from Chicago to Virginia to partner with the Plaza Azteca group of restaurants. He is proud of the recipe he now serves.

"Even if we just give it away for free, it has our name on it. We take pride in our white sauce," he says. "It's like ranch dressing, but it's our ranch. It's like a Mexican version of ranch dressing."

El Toro recipe, Virginian-Pilot, 2006

In response to numerous reader requests for El Toro's recipe for white sauce, The Pilot published a recipe on May 17, 2006. The recipe, submitted by reader B. Collins of Virginia Beach, closely mimics the hand-written recipe supplied by former El Toro employee Sharon Mason Barish.

El Toro White Sauce

2 cups Miracle Whip

Let's Eat

Weekly

---

We're serving up restaurant reviews and news about the local food scene every week.

>

½ cup milk

½ to 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper

¾ teaspoon cumin

1½ teaspoons garlic powder

1½ teaspoons dried oregano

* Mix all ingredients together at least 2 days in advance to allow flavors to meld. Serve cold with chips.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318,  matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com

[Fist 666]

Sounds tasty, never had it.

 

I'm guessing it's true inspiration  origin was Doritoes  Cool Ranch.

[morton]

How does miracle whip with milk and dried oregano sound tasty?

 

It is nasty, the true inspiration was gringo customers dipping chips in the nasty Sysco ranch dressing that was put out with their salad and tostitos, and then waiters just running with it.

Edited October 8, 2022 by morton
salad

[morton]

I was just thinking that perhaps our resident foodie lugr might be up for taking this one for a test drive and reporting back.

 

For the full experience maybe take it to the local "Hot Plate Amigo" joint and have them serve alongside some canre asada. 

[LUGR]

10 hours ago, ndv said:

 

I have been to a few the do serve the red and white, (white not as in queso) its some type of mild sauce similar to the red but has a slight coconut flavor, (think more so tropical).  It's pretty good actually.

The dude who made your sauce that day had been eating coconut.

[LUGR]

2 hours ago, morton said:

I was just thinking that perhaps our resident foodie lugr might be up for taking this one for a test drive and reporting back.

 

For the full experience maybe take it to the local "Hot Plate Amigo" joint and have them serve alongside some canre asada. 

I don’t really get down with miracle whip, maybe I’ll make a small batch with mayo.

Somebody should call Matthew Korfhage at 757-446-2318 to see if this shit is really legit and he is not just making a joke on the internet.

[One Man Banned]

1st thought seeing that # was it would be funny if a bunch of Oontzers started calling dude out of the blue to call out an article he wrote in 2019.

[One Man Banned]

Some of you are going to lose your shit when you find out the souf has white BBQ sauce.  Parilla de Pinga?

[mr.yuck]

Lol. Damnit man. It would be a creation of Hampton Roads.

 

@mortonhave you been out and tried this decadent culinary experience yet? 

[Mercer]

This thread is proof there's not enough Mexicans in the North East yet. I've never even heard of white sauce out here in former Mexican territory, or in NYC. Sounds like when the actual food is too spicy for Americans so they make up food like Chop Suey. 

 

There are only 4 places in the world I could eat local only for the rest of my life and be happy, Mexico is def one of them. 

[LUGR]

4 hours ago, morton said:

I was just thinking that perhaps our resident foodie lugr might be up for taking this one for a test drive and reporting back.

 

For the full experience maybe take it to the local "Hot Plate Amigo" joint and have them serve alongside some canre asada. 

Alright, so I decided to whip up a batch of salsa de pinga for breakfast this morning. Tastes alright fresh, now I will age the batch for two days as recommended by Mr. Korfhage.

 

I think “hot plate amigo” will be the new name for my microwave.

[LUGR]

4 hours ago, Fist 666 said:

Sounds tasty, never had it.

 

I'm guessing it's true inspiration  origin was Doritoes  Cool Ranch.

This pretty much sums the flavor of salsa de pinga up…..cool ranch Doritos.

[Elena Delle Donne]

interesting that this is just from seven cities. we have it in dc but it's not everywhere. the places that strictly do mexican are usually more upscale, the $4 taco places, that kind of thing. the places that are mixed salvadoran/mexican have this and it's definitely just mayo which idon't really rock with. feels supremely white to be putting mayo on mexican food 

[fat ralphy]

California here - so basically Mexico.

 

We aren’t fucking with “white sauce”.

 

In fact I don’t even know what it is - was with a Mexican for 16 years and I stay fuckin with taquerias. 

 

 

[morton]

To add something that is actually tasty, Mexican and mayonnaise. 

[LUGR]

2 hours ago, morton said:

To add something that is actually tasty, Mexican and mayonnaise. 

^You might as well dip your chips right into that.

[LUGR]

@mr.yucklooking kinda lonely in these poll results 

[morton]

31 minutes ago, LUGR said:

^You might as well dip your chips right into that.

Not white enough, we are talking miracle whip white for the chips. 

[Mercer]

On a semi related note, we've got 3 Mexican Restaurants in my neighborhood. Two Mexicali joints,  and the newest one. New one is maad popular, always packed so my wife and her friend went to check it out.

 

The brought me back some leftover ribs later, and I coulda sworn someone rinsed the ribs off in the sink (well do that for our dog). Looked down at them and nope, sauce was still there. I've never tasted unseasoned ribs in my life, no fucking bueno. The other tacos and shit were garbage. They both said the place was terrible.

 

Funny thing is it's the busiest one out of the 3 in my area, and when I drive past judging people I notice they're all super white. Then it makes sense why that shit is lit, as I watch them gorge themselves on rinsed rib tasting ass "not too spicy please". You know on any given night there's at least one table that brought a Mexican homie there in a flex gone wrong.

Edited October 8, 2022 by Mercer
6 or 7 typos

[LUGR]

This white sauce is some of the whitest shit I have ever seen.

[Mercer]

1 minute ago, LUGR said:

This white sauce is some of the whitest shit I have ever seen.

 

It don't matter