Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Monthly Mazatlán Round-Up



MazReal's monthly round-up of local news comes at a time when this fine city is at it's fullest with our delightful friends the expats. Swooningly handsome Jim 'Knees' MacTavish and our stunningly beautiful Nigellisima talk food, cheeky Nate Slapper takes you to Cuba and adventurous explorer dangerman Dick 'Dangerman' van Dyck risks his neck riding our delighful public transport.


RESTAURANTS - The All-You-Can-Eat Craze

Sushi from The 貪欲な

There are a number of things that bother people who eat at restaurants. The main being that you can never get enough. But that problem has been eliminated by "All-You-Can-Eat Restaurants' popping up all over the place where everyone that encounters the problematic 'lack-of-food-on-your-plate problem' can swing by and eat until you throw up then eat some more.

Sushi generally comes in such tiny proportions that it can be very frustrating when the steep bill comes and you realize that that was it! So you take the fastest pulmonia over to MucDonalds in NoMa and fill the gaps in your stomach that the tiny portions of sushi failed to fill with the  salty crap they serve there. 

In Japanese society the making of sushi is generally considered to be an art form that combines visual presentation with flavour hence the high prices. But here in Mazatlán that problem of eating practical and functional art has also been eliminated in bypassing the visual delights of colour and form and filling your table with long thin pink and grey things chopped into bite size chunks. 

The latest is a sushi restaurant called THE貪欲な豚 near the Plaza Dominguez.  THE貪欲な豚 is a well kept secret because the members of the shadowy あなたがクラブを食べることができるすべてのhave kept it so secret and dark that only they know where it is. The door is black and the wall is black and at night it is invisible.

THE 貪欲な豚 is an intimate joint run by a good friend of mine Yohei Hanaya Jnr. great grandson of the famous sushi maker from the 18th century. Yohei or YoHey to his friends used to be big in the Tokyo branch of the Yakuzi (Jacuzzi bathing gangsters) where he was bath attendant. YoHey escaped Japan by the skin of his teeth after boiling alive five gangsters when he went outside for a cigarette after forgetting to switch on the heat thermostat for the jacuzzi. He found his way to the docks after befriending a gang of sailors he picked up at Vitrolas' Japanese branch in the Tokyo docks and worked his passage on a Mazatlán shrimp boat that had got lost and found its way to Japan. On the return crossing he learned the art of serving shrimp sushi to the Mexican shrimp sailors and also had a part time job as a rent boy serving the hunky seafarers. They befriended him and helped him set up THE 貪欲な豚 with shrimp cartel money, it is said. But don't mention it because the shadowy あなたがクラブを食べることができるすべての have ears everywhere.


This is not the actual restaurant. But it will serve food kind of similar to this in a different kind of restaurant that is not as clean as this one in Singapore.


THE貪欲な豚 is small and has the gloomy mystique of an East Asian backstreet brothel and opium den with it's blood stained ceiling, floor and walls, bare-flamed Angor Wat wall candles, bare-arsed Malay waiters and a 52 inch flat screen TV and video pumping out ear-bleeding music and unintelligible classic Japanese 日本映画 movies. Heavy Mediaeval furniture and refectory tables are scattered haphazardly around and the atmosphere alludes to a private bawdy London East End Victorian slum pub except in one corner where a burbling tank filled with gurgling fish alludes to a Beijing street market for it is from this bubbling, ganurdeling tank that your meal will sometimes originate. (That is if you order the baby crocodile sushi)

But hey we are getting diverted with inane chit chat - we are forgetting the food. If, like me, you and me have a dose of cold turkey for want of food, any food, since visiting the all-you-can-eat breakfast at Hotel Freeman an hour back, then you, like me, like you, we and me are in luck. Because once you settle in, your table is soon groaning with stuff. Stuff that looks like sushi, and maybe is, or maybe not, but probably is because this is a sushi joint. 

It's soooo much fun because it has now become a guessing game and you may be eating anything including delicate slices of glistening raw horse meat recently shipped in from France sitting on a bed of sea cucumbers and Galapagos puffer fish livers or rice wrapped in salivating  Easter Island sea weed, Chilian sea urchin tongues and veal just shipped in from Tuscany. Or it may be big chunks of pink gleaming Firth-Of-Forth farmed SalmonTrout literally slathered in a mouth-watering fricassee of Thames River eel and Cod roe recently shipped in from the Great Barrier Reef in StraliaLand all served on a pristine mountain of heavenly steamed rice recently picked grain by grain by galley slaves from YokoOnoLand. 

Who knows what the hell it is that is passing into your salivating, gaping jaws, but my God is it good. So good in fact that it has turned hardened atheists into God fearing, bible punching Moonies.

So if you are low in funds and feel a yen for a belly full of 'sushi' and are passing by a black door on Calle Capitan y Tennille, why not slip in and get involved in the ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT fashion at THE貪欲な豚*


Small Print
Receptacles are handily provided to throw up in.
There is no cast iron guarantee that this is actually a 'sushi' restaurant.
* see Google Translate

Smaller Print.
This restaurant does not exist except in the mind of our 'food writer' Jim 'Knees'' MacTavish. So no suing MazREal when you cannot find it in your craze to locate food to fill your stomach.


More articles after the jump


Sunday, January 13, 2013

Some Images We Liked In 2012 From Around Mazatlán



Mazatlán does not only comprise the square kilometre of two of Centro.  Beyond the Centro frontier there are some visual delights to be had and here are some of them from this last year and beyond...................

This extended gallery (one of two) just goes to show what an eclectic, interesting, colourful and surprising city this place is.












more luverly stuff after the break

all images ©Matt Mawson


Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Artspeak #1



"Still making snow art?"

"yep."

"Yesterday your sculpture melted."

"I know. This time I'm taking advantage of my medium's impermanence.
This sculpture is about transience. As this figure melts, it invites the viewer to contemplate the evanescence of life. This piece speaks of the horror of our own mortality. They're not supposed to like it! This is avant-garde stuff and the problem with being avant-garde is knowing who's putting on who."

Thursday, January 3, 2013

End Of Year Round Up. Notable 2012 Mazatlán Stories.




January - Lobster Leaves Town



2012 was an eventful year in Mazatlán and luckily MazReal and its staff of dedicated reporters, photographers and critics were there to report on it. The most remarkable scoop of the year was news of the baby lobster called Zeke that decided it had had enough of Mazatlán. We were there to interview it as it made its way down the road to start a new life in Guadalajara.

"Guadalajara is where it's at." succinctly explained the celebrity crustacean. 
He went on,  "Mazatlán is so 2012."

"Why is that? Explain yourself." demanded the tetchy reporter. (Somewhat angry with the lobster assignment as he had just returned from Aleppo and interviewing sea creatures was not part of his remit.)

Refusing to be drawn, the canny crustacean spat brusquely:

"Ships don't stop here anymore and my job as the tourism guide in Plaza Machado has gone."

" Being jobless in Mexico is depressing," explained Zeke, " Especially if you are subphylum of the arthropods and a vital part of the food chain"

On scuttling off the little critter shouted over his shoulder:

" I got a bus to catch amigo. I'm outta here. Toot toot." *


*Sadly we heard later that the Arthropod Zeke was flattened by a car as it crossed against the lights. It's common knowledge that sea creatures never do well in heavy traffic.


more old news after the break

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