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| Is that a Cal bear I see? |
When I went abroad to London in 2001, I may have missed the food back home, but I didn’t give it much more thought than wishing I could get my hands on a decent burrito. Well, when two guys from California studied abroad in Santiago in 2001, they missed the food so much they came back in 2006 to bring Californian cuisine to Chile. The result is California Cantina, the gringo hangout in Providencia that I haven’t wanted to admit has my name all over it. But this weekend Ryan and I found ourselves a little more homesick than usual (I’m five weeks into a no-Mexican food diet and Ryan’s nearly a year in), so we decided to go find a cure–in the form of a hamburger and beer on tap for him and fish tacos and fresh margarita for me. And, as my loyal followers well know, imagine my pure delight when I opened the menu and saw this:
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| I’m talking about the Humboldt Hummus if anyone missed that. |
And here is my pure delight:
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| Happiness is… four kinds of hummus. |
The menu had plenty of other witty spins on Cali (“Chile-fornia” was my fav) to make us feel right at home, as did plenty of sporty flat-screens and eavesdrops of English just about everywhere we turned. I’m not saying I need to to find California in Chile, but when you do get a little taste on a winter night in Santiago, there’s certainly no harm in feeling like you’re right back at the
Park Chalet with the sounds of the Pacific nearby. It helped that we recently watched the Oscar-snubbed, “
Hot Tub Time Machine,” and could chalk this all up to being our very own portal to hummus and burritos and all that the best Cali brew-pubs have to offer from 6,000 miles away.
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| Yowzas, that was one strong margarita. |
It also didn’t hurt that we could look across the table at one another and say in all seriousness: “You’re my California.” (Okay, I’ll admit I’d had the strong margarita by that point). But what it truly means is that no matter how far this grand adventure takes us from our home state, we always have home in one another. Plus, we’ve mastered shrimp burritos from scratch, so we can go the distance without La Playa beach burritos right around the corner. The hummus on the other hand… not so much. As for the hummus you see above, rest assured that NONE of it went to waste. We’re already planning to go back for those Highway 101 Wings. Now, if I can just find some decent queso around here, we’ll be all good. But that would necessitate the arrival of a dear Texan friend of mine. Hmm, I feel some entrepreneurial spirit a-brewin…
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| Guess how many pics it took to get this just right?! |
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