Tex-Mex in a quiet cafe

FRIDAY, December 28, just chilling in my pambahay and getting zonked with the regular telenovelas for lack of anything else to listen to, it is nearer midnight than dinner when my cellphone rang.

Paringbert is in town, would want to meet up, and share a cup or two for the Christmas and New Year, Mabel says. She’ll be picking me up in five minutes. I looked at my state of dishabille – very old boxer shorts and equally old, near-rag commercial t-shirt, I asked for ten minutes.

The meeting place, where we get to exchange gifts, is the Tazza di Bonta at Insular Village 1, that short row of shops where the most visible is the Monterey meat shop. It used to be called Jose Rafael.

I’ve been seeing that coffeeshop for some time now, maybe a year or maybe less, but never had the chance to drop by. That night, I learned it closes at 12 midnight. It was already 11 when we arrived. Paringbert was there, sipping a big glass of fresh lemon juice.

We chose to share a teapot of the beautiful tea, although I can’t remember which mix we got; I just chose based on the picture of how the ball of tea would bloom. The tea is the one that blossoms into a bouquet inside your teapot. I first saw that as a pasalubong from bestest’s wife Maan who got it from Tagaytay, in one of those posh places that could easily sell tea leaves for a thousand or more. It’s beautiful.

We also had beef nachos and cheese quesadillas. Both the nachos and the quesadillas were a revelation. They use real corn chips, not the Granny Goose tortillas and similar MSG-laced stuff. The quesadilla dough was chewily crusty.

There were other interesting stuff in there, like the chili and cinnamon flavored Mayan Xocolat, which caught my eye because it was less than a week when the Mayan calendar was suppose to have ended. I didn’t buy though because I still have more chocolates than I can consume in half a year and then the row of herb teas.

By the time we nibbled down the quesadillas and tacos, however, the coffeeshop had already closed. Time to go.

I’ll keep this place in mind when I need some peace and quiet.

P.S. I know I should’ve removed the teaspoons in those dips in the photos, but it was already near-midnight and my braincells were no longer working.