Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Frogs in Puebla
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Last week at my book club the selection was George Orwell’s 1984. As we gathered around the cookies and coffee, a flouncy purple dress would not stop talking about her recent holiday in Mexico.
As she told it, she ate at Mérida’s best restaurants, visited charming streets unknown to most Americans and made lifelong friends of the locals. Her voice a decibel too loud just in case anyone might not hear her, she declared her rhapsodic kinship with the Mexican people.
I wanted to put us out of our misery with an Orwellian observation. “All the normal stigmata of the travel report: the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the ‘soul’ of a town after spending two hours in it.” Instead, pinching my lips together, I reduced myself to assessing her tan, still aglow with a rusting, flaking color.
The stupidity of the woman. We pass by a place for a mere twinkling moment in time and space.
I’m a repeat visitor to Puebla, Mexico. I like the food, the museums, the historic buildings, the energy. I like the controlled chaos. The boisterous bustle of the streets.
But what I know, or think I know, of Puebla and its people is episodic, spotty, frayed. Just as what I know about my own town is imperfect.
People busy with their lives, jobs, families, friends are not my playground. Unless working at some kowtowing hospitality job earning outsized tips from tourists, I’m not worth—or worthy of—their time.
Happily, and humbly, I can savor Puebla’s charms—its deceptions and its delights—without pretense. No need to interrupt the locals before enjoying a Las Ranas torta.
Las Ranas Taqueria is around the corner from the colonial era zócalo. Its logo, a jumping green frog, is hammered to a bland brick building. It looks as if it were lifted from a child’s learn-the-alphabet book. “F” is for Frog.
In Spanish, ‘ranas’ means ‘frogs.’ Even so, I can’t find a single menu item using even a sliver of froggy ingredients. Even the signature sandwich—also called Las Ranas—is frog-free.
Instead, the house specialty is Taco Árabe. Marinated, spit-grilled pork tucked into a charred Middle Eastern–style flatbread stuffed with greens, onions and a mystery sauce. Iced horchata, a sweetly flavored rice milk, is the nearly mandatory pairing.
A television blares a soccer match, play-by-play, olé after olé. The cooks rotate their attention between carving meat, assembling food orders and watching the game. Wafting off the open-air grill, the smoky aroma of sizzling, searing pork hangs in the air.
Dripping from every side of the sandwich, meaty juices soak my forearms. My mouth stuffed, I am half-grinning, half-chewing. I promise my tastebuds that—before I croak—I will return to Las Ranas.
Walking off my meal around the zócalo, I inhale the scent from the jacaranda trees. They cleanse the air of every other smell. My pink cheeks are the unassuming color of the pork from Las Ranas.
As Orwell might have noted, it’s best not to judge a taquería by its logo.
