Bienvenidos a Mexican Dining Week on OnMilwaukee.com. This week, in honor of Cinco de Mayo, we're spicing things up with daily articles about Mexican restaurants, foods, drinks, sweets and more. Enjoy a week of sizzling stories that will leave you craving Milwaukee's Latin offerings. Olé!
Growing up in Milwaukee in the 1950s and '60s was a white bread experience, with the exception of Fridays, when we ate rye bread – with our fish fries.
Flavor enhancement began and ended with salt in my family's kitchen. My mom made chili without chili powder.
Pizza was the exotic new ethnic food. Carry-out chop suey from Chinese restaurants was as gastronomically adventurous as many Milwaukeeans cared or dared to be. Our palates were being trained on generally bland European cuisines, and while some of us were eating duck blood soup or sauerbraten at home, our tastes were far from global.
Nacho, quesadilla and chimichanga were not in our vocabulary. Margarita? Must be a girl's name.
I moved from Milwaukee in 1969 without ever having seen a Mexican restaurant in my hometown. A trip to Southern California the year before had made me aware of a chain called Taco Bell, but the taco thing sounded a little dangerous. Too foreign for my tender taste buds.
Returning to Brew City from the East Coast in 1972, I discovered a Mexican restaurant had opened within a mile of my new home. I suspect that El Matador, which occupied the space now filled by BBC Bar & Grill at 2022 E. North Ave., introduced most East Siders to Mexican food. It was the lone outpost north of Walker's Point for south-of-the-border cuisine.
Operated by the Monreal family, El Matador had three locations – 6th and Bruce, 92nd and Bluemound, and the North Avenue spot. The last one closed years ago.
Coaxed into the East Side El Matador by friends, I learned that my stomach would not explode if I ate sliced jalapenos, and the gooey goodness of cheese and onion enchiladas seemed quite natural in the cheesehead state.
It would be a number of years before the first Taco Bell showed up in Milwaukee, along with Chi-Chi's, mechanical riding peppers and bottled salsa in supermarkets.
Damien has been around so long, he was at Summerfest the night George Carlin was arrested for speaking the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. He was also at the Uptown Theatre the night Bruce Springsteen's first Milwaukee concert was interrupted for three hours by a bomb scare. Damien was reviewing the concert for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote for the Journal and Journal Sentinel for 37 years, the last 29 as theater critic.
During those years, Damien served two terms on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, a term on the board of the association's foundation, and he studied the Latinization of American culture in a University of Southern California fellowship program. Damien also hosted his own arts radio program, "Milwaukee Presents with Damien Jaques," on WHAD for eight years.
Travel, books and, not surprisingly, theater top the list of Damien's interests. A news junkie, he is particularly plugged into politics and international affairs, but he also closely follows the Brewers, Packers and Marquette baskeball. Damien lives downtown, within easy walking distance of most of the theaters he attends.
