Word: mex
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Robert Rodriguez, the film's writer, director, co-producer and editor, describes his action comedy -- about a singer-guitarist mistaken in a Mexican border town for a killer who totes his artillery in a guitar case -- as "a taco Western." We'd call it a rough, funny Mad Mex. Now all Hollywood is calling Rodriguez because Columbia Pictures is distributing his movie. Not bad for a 24-year-old who raised nearly half the film's budget (okay, $3,000) by serving as a "lab rat" in a medical-research project in his hometown of Austin, Texas...
Does the N.R.A. know about this? One Tex-Mex place features waitresses who shoot tequila and mixers from little pistols. Now waiters in elegant eateries are wielding pepper guns. Watch out for coffee, tea and wine guns. And duck...
...food, which Miller dubs "modern Western," is steeped in the same pioneering spirit. His eclectic menu ranges from neo-Tex-Mex tidbits like chipotle chile breadsticks to fresh-baked buckwheat cinnamon bread, smoked duck and buffalo jerky. "Smoking is a natural by-product of heat," Miller says, launching into an aria of poetic exaltation. "There's an intensity of wildness, of untamed flavor. It's loaded symbolically with a primordial sense of fire and man. I read a lot of meaning into food. I think it's one of the last experimental frontiers...
America's infatuation with the once humble (and often shunned) chile has been fueled by a proliferation everywhere of Mexican and nouvelle Tex-Mex restaurants over the past decade and a growing public appetite for new flavor sensations. Last year sales of salsa, whose main ingredient is chile, surpassed catsup by $40 million, making it the country's most popular condiment. The peppers are popping up in such mainstream products as Le Menu "Santa Fe style" frozen dinners and McDonald's chicken fajitas. Manufacturers are packaging chile pastas, chile jams and jellies, chile catsup, chile-spiced mustards, peanuts, potato chips...
...Square is conspicuously lacking in genuine high-quality Mexican fare. Its most popular Tex-Mex restaurant, The Border Cafe on Church Street, generally wins lukewarm reviews from people used to the genuine article...