Above: Monterrey Shrimp at Carreta’s Grill. Opposite: The patio at Carreta’s Grill in Slidell. 132
the first fajitas, wildly popular. Chimichangas were also exciting and new. And the place had a bunch of gimmicks going on. A customer’s birthday was treated as if it were New Year’s Eve. Perhaps because the Texas influx came mostly from Houston and Dallas suburbs, many Mexican restaurants felt very much at home in St. Tammany Parish. Beginning in the 1980s, on a per capita basis the number of Mexican restaurants in Slidell, Mandeville and Covington was as high as the number of such places in New Orleans proper. That growth continues, and in a gratifying way. Most of the many new south-of-the-border cantinas on the northshore opened with menus much closer in tune with real Mexican restaurants in Mexico. There have even been some attempts to open restaurants with Central American and Caribbean dishes, cooked by people who were born to those cuisines. Because my family has always had a liking for Mexican food (my daughter had a taste for very spicy salsa since she was about 4 years old) and because we have lived on the northshore for 25 years, I have done a lot of research on this matter. And
Inside Northside
I’m sticking with my thesis that a disproportionate number of the area’s best Mexican restaurants are on the north end of the Causeway. The leading edge of this bounty involves a 12-unit chain out of Hammond called La Carreta. It has northshore branches in Amite, Ponchatoula, Hammond, Mandeville and Covington It also operates in some confusion. Another small northshore Mexican chain has a similar name: Carreta’s Grill. This restaurant group offers a lively dining environment on both sides of the lake with four locations; Covington, Slidell, Metairie and Harahan. And another Covington restaurant called Habaneros also seems to have some sort of family connection. There are similarities among all these, but I will focus on La Carreta’s two restaurants in the Mandeville-Covington stretch. My wife and daughter—both avid consumers of Tex-Mex—alerted me to the goodness of La Carreta not long after it opened some years ago. They zero in on the thin, crackly, warm chips and a salsa with more lime juice than I’ve tasted elsewhere. They get a tub of choriqueso—a mixture of queso dip with Mexican chorizo, an exciting hot sausage. Then they move to the steak dishes. The best is skirt steak with a chipotle pepper sauce. Also good are a few dishes whose surname is “al diablo”—a peppery sauce that goes well with shrimp or chicken. My function is relegated to ordering what the ladies want to eat. If I order it, they just reach over and help themselves. (Did you know that if you eat a dish somebody else ordered, you incur none of the calories?) For myself, I just order light dishes. I get a bowl of the bean soup almost every time. The romaine and avocado salad features a unique cilantro vinaigrette, the best new salad dressing I have tasted since remoulade crossed over from sauce to dressing. The menu goes on to include the complete range of Mexican dishes. I think the place is good enough to add a molé poblano dish to the menu. That sauce—based on peppers, sesame seeds, and bitter chocolate—is one of the world’s greatest sauces and an indicator of the ambitiousness of a Mexican