Wednesday, November 08, 2006
LA PALAPA
So it’s my wife’s sister’s first night in town, and we’re ready to show off our Baltimore native experience. Where do we take her to eat? Ellicott City. Oh, well.
We settled on La Palapa, which I'm pretty sure is Spanish for "the palapa". We were in the mood for Mexican and my wife had fond memories of their molè sauce. For those who don’t know, a mole is a sauce made from a choclate base, usually has about 17 ingredients, and is typically very spicy. It is our thought that they get a lot of customers who read “choclate sauce” on the menu and are unprepared for the actual experience. Whenever the Chicken Molè is ordered, the waitress invariably asks, “Are you sure? Do you know what that is?” Last time the waitress even brought back a bowl of it from the kitchen for my wife to taste before she accepted the order.
After running that gauntlet, I ordered the Burro. I couldn’t get over the name but apparently it’s innocent enough, beef tips served in a savory burrito. The food is always good, but the service was a little hit and miss that night. It seemed they just had the one waitress for our crowded section, which included several families, so it took a while to get a second beer (they have an extensive list of Mexican cervezas) leaving no time to enjoy a third with the meal.
When we were done we walked down Ellicott City’s historic Main Street, marveling at the quaint ambiance and the architecture of the structures built up against and into the solid rock. My sister-in-law was utterly enchanted with The Forget-Me-Not-Factory, a three-story building filled with collectibles, holiday knick-knacks, gift items, and costumes. It also had the advantage of being one of the few stores still open at that time of night.
We settled on La Palapa, which I'm pretty sure is Spanish for "the palapa". We were in the mood for Mexican and my wife had fond memories of their molè sauce. For those who don’t know, a mole is a sauce made from a choclate base, usually has about 17 ingredients, and is typically very spicy. It is our thought that they get a lot of customers who read “choclate sauce” on the menu and are unprepared for the actual experience. Whenever the Chicken Molè is ordered, the waitress invariably asks, “Are you sure? Do you know what that is?” Last time the waitress even brought back a bowl of it from the kitchen for my wife to taste before she accepted the order.
After running that gauntlet, I ordered the Burro. I couldn’t get over the name but apparently it’s innocent enough, beef tips served in a savory burrito. The food is always good, but the service was a little hit and miss that night. It seemed they just had the one waitress for our crowded section, which included several families, so it took a while to get a second beer (they have an extensive list of Mexican cervezas) leaving no time to enjoy a third with the meal.
When we were done we walked down Ellicott City’s historic Main Street, marveling at the quaint ambiance and the architecture of the structures built up against and into the solid rock. My sister-in-law was utterly enchanted with The Forget-Me-Not-Factory, a three-story building filled with collectibles, holiday knick-knacks, gift items, and costumes. It also had the advantage of being one of the few stores still open at that time of night.
# posted by Renfield @ 8:16 AM 
