El Ganadero: Go for The Guac, Stay for the Journey
By Anna Esquivel
It should come as no surprise that the very best guacamole I’ve ever had was in a small fishing village just off the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Some friends boated us to a rocky, remote shoreline just south of Puerto Vallarta where we were led through virgin jungle to a hidden waterfall. When we returned to our coastal camp, a local fisherman and his wife had cooked up his fresh catch and, with it, made us a large bowl of guacamole. Maybe there was magic in that jungle that infused itself into the local ingredients. Maybe I was starving from the 4-hour hike scaling boulders and ducking palm leaves. Whatever it was, I still remember the citrusy, fragrant tang of the lime and cilantro that coated the oily fruit. There’s something a bit melancholy when discovering new tastes and dishes during my travels. The novelty, the cultural connections, the surprises are tempered by knowing that I’ll be hard pressed to ever find something so good again. So, imagine my surprise when I found another “very best guacamole”, and a kind of visit to the heart of Mexico, right here in Jackson.
El Ganadero, tucked into the long plaza near Tractor Supply on Carriage House, is in many ways like most Mexican restaurants in Jackson–familiar decor, familiar menu items–but in the ways that matter, it felt much more like my favorite Summer Ave. dives in Memphis, where you can almost bet that the lower quality the dining room furniture the better the pastor is going to be. At El Ganadero, the waitress did not speak English, though she understood it well. Non-English speakers who make the South their home get a master class in deciphering all the Englishes that Southerners speak, so I might not have known that she wasn’t fluent in English had I not wanted to ask her more probing questions about the food and the restaurant than she was likely used to. She relaxed considerably when Spanish flowed freely between her and my lunch partner, who is from Puerto Rico and enjoys every opportunity to speak in her native language. Immediately, I was back in Puerto Vallarta, Oaxaca, or Mexico City, where I was the outsider, struggling to recall words I’m not sure I ever really knew.
Before long, we were offered chips and salsa. Two kinds, salsa roja and salsa verde. Both were too hot for either of us to actually eat. The chips were perfect, though, in that they were nothing special. They weren’t the thin, greasy, tenuous things you get at some restaurants; they were thick, crunchy, and lightly salted. Palette cleansers; vehicles for the guac. I should warn you: there is no cheese dip at El Ganadero. Cheese dip isn’t a Mexican staple. Avocados are. And how guacamole is prepared can tell you a lot about how much attention is paid to the staples of Mexican cuisine at a restaurant.
In my house growing up, avocados were the weird-smelling green mush my dad spread on top of toast. Raised in Southern California, he was making avocado toast before it was cool. Unfortunately, thanks to his prescience, I avoided avocado for many years. The farther you get from the places where avocado is a kitchen staple, the more the avocado seems like an afterthought, a garnish at best. This is tragic for someone who knows what the avocado can do, when it is allowed to shine. At El Ganadero, they know what to make of an avocado. You might have to wait a little while the cook cuts up the cilantro, tomato, and onion fresh; this isn’t the guac that’s been pre-prepared and sitting in the walk-in. The result is worth the wait. Like that coastal guacamole, the star wasn’t just the avocado, though they had chosen the perfect ones. It certainly wasn’t the onion and tomato, which could be abandoned completely if I had my druthers. The most underappreciated co-stars, in my opinion, are the lime and cilantro. The right combination of lime, cilantro, avocado, and salt sends me back to that rugged coastline where there was no kitchen or refrigeration, just what you could grow, catch, cut up, and cook over a fire.
I was so captivated by the guacamole, I had almost forgotten that we had ordered half the menu when our waitress brought out some aluminum-wrapped tortillas with the silverware. My grandfather used tortillas this way, as a kind of utensil. Forks are optional. The minced pastor and the asada tacos came in a small corn tortilla with no other accouterments. As it should be. A good seasoned meat is all you really need anyway. The pork and beef were crispy but with just enough fat to soften it up, like the leftover pieces I would steal from the bottom of paper towel-lined plates when we had the luxury of making homemade enchiladas and chile con carne.
As we ate, the dining room slowly filled with the kind of clientele that validates the authenticity of a place. Day-laborers, men with paint- and cement-bespeckled jeans and steel-toed boots, sitting alone in a moment of reprieve with their caldo de res or menudo. Good food is working-class food, the kind that can send you into a momentary reverie–a reprieve from the difficult tasks of the day–but still nourish the over-taxed, overworked body. We chatted with a couple of the diners, young men who seemed to be working on the same job. They asked us if we’d noticed the paintings that hung above the booths–beautiful paintings of abuelos and Our Lady of Guadalupe that had smaller pictures hidden within.
Across from the paintings was a large mural of Zacatecas (a state in central Mexico) and Cerro de la Bufa, a historical landmark in the Battle of Zacatecas, a crucial win for Pancho Villa against Huerta. I tell the owner of the restaurant that my family is from nearby Morelia, and he replies, “Ah, yes. Michoacan.” States are as important to Mexicans as they are to Americans. We have silhouettes of Tennessee hanging in our homes and emblazoned in our shops; they have murals depicting histories and landmarks of their own home states. The restaurant is also decorated with old photos of Mexican revolutionaries. When I asked about the significance of those pictures, I was expecting the owner to tell me tall tales of mythical ancestors who had fought with Villa. Instead, he just shrugged and said, “I found them in a store and I bought them.” I suppose to underscore the theme of the revolutionary-cum-mascot who looms large on the wall mural. “El Ganadero” means rancher, so I asked if they were a family of ranchers. They were not. Construction, mostly, and had been in the US for more than 25 years. His cousin’s nickname is “El Ganadero”. Rodrigo El Ganadero. He stopped short of an origin story, as though the nickname was self-explanatory.
Travel is much like that conversation and a good guacamole: it subverts expectations and, in doing so, delights even more than one could hope. Visiting El Ganadero was my own way of traveling right here in Jackson. As soon as you walk through the doors, you know you’re somewhere different, somewhere novel. Somewhere that will take a few extra minutes to serve up the very best guacamole this side of the Rio Grande.