Danish Restaurant Review: Tortilla Flats Mexican Restaurant, Vejle

This note was for my own therapy; it began with a kalamata under the arrow, followed by some shredded carrots, and finally, as you see, ended with the curly parsley. (I did not leave it for the staff — it was for ME and for me only, as I’m not quite ready to stop being so polite.)

Sigh.

It’s fine. It’s fine.

I wasn’t angry this time, when I left the restaurant. Which is perhaps the best I could have hoped for. The first time I ate at Tortilla Flats, I left in a huff of indignation, swimming in a sea of ruminations about the importance of at LEAST understanding the proper flavor profile of the ethnic cuisine one purports to be cooking. When you walk into a restaurant so lush with fancy lamps and phallic soap holders in the bathrooms, and the faint sound of the theme from “Cops” being sung by the karaoke party on the floor below you, you expect something magical of the food. Or, at the very least, when you walk into a Mexican restaurant, you expect to eat food that tastes like Mexican food: lime, cilantro, cumin, garlic… You know. But all I could see and taste on my first visit was a hot mess of confusion. I was blinded with rage over the kalamata olives (KALAMATAS?) that garnished the overpriced guacamole and my overpriced enchilada. Not to mention the shredded raw carrots and curly parsley that seemed to be getting all up into everything’s business on my plate. And the strong, over-seasoned taste of the enchilada filling, wherein there seemed to be some kind of confusion about the proper use of coriander seeds playing itself out. Ditto for the salsa. Why on God’s green earth did they use the seed of the coriander plant so extensively when they should be using the LEAF???? These were the things that haunted me after our first visit. Haunted me, dear readers. Yes, haunted. Like a house.

So. When my husband and I had a few hours to ourselves recently while grandma and grandpa looked after the little ankle biters, we did not expect to end up at ol’ Tortilla Flats. But, in this region of Denmark, most places are closed on Sunday evenings, so we knew our options would be limited. Tortilla Flats had earned itself a place on my “No Fucking Way Not Ever Again” list of restaurants after our first visit, and it was in a permanent time out, if you will. It’s not that its food was SO bad, it’s just that the food was off kilter in a way that had, at the time, deeply offended and angered me in my newly-arrived-in-Denmark state of mind. I refused to play Tortilla Flat’s little game of “Let’s Pretend to eat Mexican Food in Denmark.” No way! Never again!

But here we were, a mere seven months later, entering Tortilla Flats, as nothing else was open that evening, unless we wanted to eat hockey pucks — er, I mean, burgers. Which we did not. So, to make the best of it, I tried to remember all of the positive aspects of our first visit as we waited to be seated. I listened closely for a Danish accented rendition of “bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you…” emanating from the basement, as it had on our last visit. No such luck this time. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I would be able to clean my hands with a bar of soap on a funny little French soap holder in the bathroom that made me feel vaguely as though I was doing something dirty and somewhat titillating rather than just washing my hands. Hats off to you, Old France.

I also was reminded, through my very own eyes, how beautiful the interior of the restaurant is. It is stunningly gorgeous. Dozens of little glass lamps, some with beaded fringe, hanging from the ceiling. Plants everywhere. Exposed beams in the walls. Mosaic artwork. Mahogany paneling in one of the dining rooms that resembled the interior of a fancy old train car, where you might expect to see slightly melancholic gentlemen in fancy three-piece suits with large moustaches and monocles, smoking giant cigars and drinking tequila. (We didn’t see any, by the way.)

But, we were still off to a good start, as we were fortunate enough to be seated next to this guy:

I’ve got two pickles, yeeeeaaahhh!!!! (caption courtesy of Amos)

I wondered for a moment if he was to be our server, and I told him that yes, please, I would like one of those pickles. He did not answer.

Then our real server came and brought us some chips and salsa. She seemed very nice, although not as jolly as the pickle guy. After inspecting the contents of the salsa dish, I braced myself as I scooped some onto a chip and inserted it into my mouth.

Sigh.

It was fine. It was a little weird — not exactly the combination of flavors I would expect to find in a salsa at a Mexican restaurant, but it was fine. And I kept eating it, not because it was so great, but because I was hungry and it was FINE, OKAY?????

It was fine.

Next, we ordered our entrees.

Me: enchiladas that cost the equivalent of about 25 USD. Amos: a tostada for about 20 USD. I tried to get my head around that one as we waited for our food. Not that Taco Bell should ever be anyone’s benchmark for anything related to actual food, but to be honest, if your first experience of a tostada is a Taco Bell tostada, it is pretty damn hard to imagine how a tostada could possibly cost 20 USD. This had better be a pretty spectacular tostada, Tortilla Flats.

And here you go:

Note the kalamata olives and the splaying, shredded raw carrots.

Spectacular it was not, but there was a lot of action on the plate — more than a Taco Bell tostada, right? Okay. So. Dining out in Denmark is never cheap, even when it really should be. Amos reported that the tostada was fine. A bit overpriced, but it wasn’t disgusting. It was just a little busy, that’s all. This is something I find very charming about my husband: when it comes to any cuisine involving beans, he is eternally optimistic and forgiving. It was a good reminder to me that I needed to temper my expectations as I delved into my entree.

Well, the enchilada had the same problems as it had the first visit, but after eight and a half months in Denmark, I had learned a thing or two regarding local manifestations of non-Danish cuisine. This time, I was able to experience the enchilada as a kind of Danish homage to the enchilada, and not as an actual enchilada. They mean well, they really do. It’s like when a child scribbles a picture of himself and says “This is me,” and you look at it and think, “Ohhh, okay.” But you smile and like it anyway because the spirit behind it was just as it should be. And the beans, although they were neither a variety of pinto nor of black, but instead some kind of kidney-ish brownish variety — well, they were good enough.

They were fine. I would eat them again, actually.

The face of tempered expectations.

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