Dos Rios Restaurant

[DonJuane]

I've found su cocina is the best restaurant in town. Much cheaper and better! This is true especially after too many years of tacos and tortas and if you are like me and sometimes are going crazy for some memorable US style food.

If your primary desired entree is meat-oriented then save up for some Prime US beef from Costco (I've recently found it in Leon, Celia and Queretaro). If it's fish, then the main city market in Queretaro, there is an excellent vendor (will have to revert to my notes) that has sashimi-grade offerings. Second stop in Queretaro is City Market Antea. Both are worth the periodic drive or bus ticket. Honorable mention is HEB in Leon and they also have Stubbs BBQ sauce and Shiner Bock beer, plus a few other Austin favorites ;-)

Still, a good bargain if cooking is "off the table" is the Delica Mitsu and it would take days to prepare in your kitchen what they offer up each day at a very reasonable price. Also up for mention is the new restaurant that sells Pho (can't recall the name at the moment) but while it's a welcome change from what's generally been available here, they fail to do the true Vietnamese 12 hour cooking of the bone marrow to create the aromatic soup base as well as leave a few markers off that natural Pho flavor that is normally expected such as star anise. They also opt for chunks of beef over paper thin sliced but perhaps they are cutting the meat themselves and don't have a slicer.

If your palate is not that refined and you want something just to give you nourishment with hopefully not too much heart-burn, then there are a number of small restaurants up and down the backroads near downtown with "menu del dia" and in this case they prepare the meals for less than you can if you consider your time invested in the equation. These places are hard to beat for long-time affordable living in Mexico but that's if you have forgotten what it's like to be spoiled with the kind of food we often find in the US. And it's all relative to what each of us calls sustainable levels of living and what is not. For example, I am a bad one to be too demanding of quality but once you've tasted better and know that you can cook it from local ingredients with just a little bit of labor added (what else are we going to be doing other than maybe laundry anyway) you, like me, may see that adding the extra time to prepare a meal and one we really enjoy makes it hard not to just do the work ourselves and that's even if the price of an alternative seems reasonable and the food palatable.

Otherwise, the rising cost you will be out (here or anywhere) to obtain a "gourmet meal" will soon deplete the most abundant of budgets. Of course you can also easily go over that while cooking at home, so keep this in mind and perhaps add to the dish size while keeping in mind some way to properly manage leftovers. Try to select items that freeze and thaw out easily and without too much destruction of the texture, as this method can help you improve the economies of scale when you want to invest the time for the robust flavor of a home cooked meal but can't afford the time repeatedly to create each a serving. Things I prepare for freezing (by sectioning off individual packets of servings and freezing independantly) are dishes like a big pot of pasta, pozole, roast, TX cook-off style chili, grilled meats, soups, stews, etc. Cassaroles also freeze and re-serve well if you have the space and don't keep them in the freezer too long.