Sweets for the sweet

There are about 400,000 Mexicans of Lebanese descent, and most of them are in Mexico City. My favorite is Achmed, pictured above, the manager of the Al-Andalus restaurant on calle Nueva York in the Colonia Nápoles, in walking distance from my apartment. The original, and more splendid, branch of the restaurant is in the centro histórico. They have everything there, except Achmed.

No matter how infrequently I go to Al-Andalus, Achmed always greets me as if I ate there every day, indeed as if I were part of the family.

When Jabbar Yassin Husin, an Iraqi writer who lives in France, visited Mexico, we made a date to have coffee together at the apartment where he was staying. He asked me to bring him some kind of cake or cookie, so I went to Al-Andalus and got an assortment of Lebanese pastries. When I told Achmed that I was bringing them to an Iraqi, he had me take him a particular cookie. He professed that at Al-Andalus the cooks prepared more delectably than they do in Baghdad.

The last thing Jabbar expected was traditional Middle-Eastern pastry in Mexico City. He fell into a Proustian swoon and insisted we go to visit Achmed. The two of them, and a couple of other men, sat for hours speaking Arabic, as if they were all old friends, shooting the breeze around the corner from the souk.

Trilingualism in Los Angeles

El Barrio

Briefly away from Mexico City, let's continue with our tour of uptown New York. Harlem has, of course, a fabled history as the most important black neighborhood in the United States, although these days Manhattan real-estate prices are so high that some blacks are being edged out by whites. But that is in the central and west sides of town. The east side of Harlem became known as El Barrio, or Spanish Harlem, in the 1960s due to a huge influx of Puerto Rican residents. These days, the area is pan-Hispanic.

I happened to take a walk there the day before an unofficial New York holiday called Puerto Rican Day. Up and down Third Avenue, as a sort of warm-up to the big day, they held a street festival celebrating Puerto Rico. The characters pictured above are a tropical equivalent of the Three Stooges.

La dieta puertorriqueña, aka a heart attack waiting to happen.

The above is an outtake from the film Babe: A Pig in the City.

Fifteen or twenty years ago there were hardly any Mexicans in New York, but now it's become más mexicana que nunca.

This is where you can get your fix of Jarritos, jabón Ariel or cacahuates japoneses. The furtive body language of the man pictured above indicates some ambiguity as to whether he is a shopper or a shoplifter.

Quote for the day

There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican.

               -- Raymond Chandler

33.2

El 33 via Yelp

One of my favorite dives used to be located a few steps from the Plaza Garibaldi, where mariachis warble and blare for the minions in Mexico City. The hang, called El 33, was a bar where transvestite prostitutes began to arrive at two or three in the morning, to relax after finishing a night's labor. Until dawn they tended to drink, dance, laugh, cry and look for boyfriends - the real ones, not the short-timers in exchange for a few pesos. The place abruptly closed its doors a few years ago.

A little while ago a reduced version of El 33 opened in the same location. Literally reduced: Without the long hallway and enormous salon in the back, it is now one of the smallest bars in the city.

On Fridays and Saturdays there is a show, which includes an Alejandro Fernández impersonator, an XXL-sized drag queen who lip-synchs along to Lucha Villa records (while wearing a banana-yellow dress with embroidered daisies), and the woman above, who imitates the singer Alicia Villareal. She began by thanking "the most select drunks of Garibaldi" for arriving to catch her act, in particular a woman who, according to the singer, "was my boyfriend when she was a man." In the above photo, she demonstrates her maternal instinct with a particularly childish customer, mid-song.