Love Letters for Zocalo UPDATE - Boston

To gain someone's love is easy compared to the task of keeping it. To gain someone’s love, you may only need one good night. My first night with Zocalo was love at first sight. To keep my love is something else altogether. To keep my love means to utter the right words at the right time, the right words at the endearingly wrong time. To keep my love means to let me see your giggling blunders, the quirks you didn’t know you had, the quirks you knew had and tried so adorably hard to hide. Anyone can be loved for a night, but after this visit, Zocalo just might be a keeper.

My second date with Zocalo didn’t start on a high note. The Crispy Avocado Sticks were a bigger blunder than taking a blind date to a work function...and finding out that your date tends to snort…after every word. Like that blind date, the avocado was ripe enough and alioli makes the world a tastier place, but the problem lay in the delivery. Or the lack thereof. This particular appetizer was by no means awful, it was just absent. When we pointed out its absence, it came as a free dessert with a heaping side of apology. No stars points lost because nothing remedies the absence of an appetizer like the comped arrival of said appetizer…and nothing remedies dating someone who snorts like…moving out of state and growing a mustache.

The Carnitas were juicy chunks of pork hand-in-hand with pineapple-cucumber guacamole. And the whole world just disappears when I’m staring into the eyes of guacamole. But when it comes to holding hands, interlaced fingers are often theorized to be more intimate than palm-to-palm. The flavor of the carnitas would have sunk in more intimately if the chunks had been the size of interlaced fingers instead of the palms. Then again, I loved the mingling of the pork and guac almost as much as I love the mingling of fingers.

The Chilaquiles Vegetarianos put the Italians and their culinary romance language to shame. It's the whole package, Casanova, Don Juan, and Henry VIII minus the side of man-whore, a trifecta of tortilla, tasty veggies, and tender black beans. The texture is uniform, the flavors blend cohesively, and the lasagna-esque spin with black beans keeps you satisfied and fulfilled. This isn’t the lasagna you dally with. This is the lasagna you marry.

Like many second visits, my visit to Zocalo wasn’t just a notch on the belt. It turned out to be 4 notches on the belt. 4 star-shaped notches, to be exact. Through an encore performance as strong as the Sangria, Zocalo has proven itself to be a long-term restaurant I can settle down with when I'm done conquering the world, one restaurant at a time. Unfortunately for Zocalo (or fortunately…I’m told I’m an acquired taste…), I doubt I'll ever settle down. Fortunately for Zocalo, it's now earned my rare respect for a place than can be counted upon to deliver. Zocalo is memorable, recommendable, and reliable. Now that's what I call a triple threat.