A couple of my favorite dishes are leaving town. With the closing of Nacho Mama’s last weekend, I’m going to have to start getting used to doing without the visual splendors of both owner Liza Pickering and my favorite repast from her menu, the “Ensheilada.”
As they say, “presentation is everything.” With Liza, it’s always been her huge and warm welcoming smile. For years on end, she and her extended restaurant family played host to the post-slopeside shenanigans of our “Heberski” gang as we attempted to wrap-up our annual day-long pillages of the trendy resort town to our north.
The Ensheilada had been originally concocted by and named for another longtime favorite dish, former Nacho Mama’s kitchen wizard Sheila Loritz. It has remained my default entrée of choice since it made its first appearance back in the day.
The other evening, sharing a table with my son Smokey, I found myself treating it like a leisurely archeological dig. Although the presentation, as always, was stunning, it didn’t take me long to move past its aesthetic quality and dive fork-first into the stuff of which pleasure is made.
For those of you not hip to this particular menu selection, imagine, if you will, a couple of enchiladas fashioned from blue-corn tortillas inside which a generous portion of spinach shares space with Monterey Jack cheese, red onions, and red, green, and gold peppers. Smothered and baked in chile verde and, as a coup de grâce, topped with pineapple salsa, it could hang on a wall next to a Matisse and not be found wanting.
Spinach first entered into my enchilada reveries back when I lived within walking distance of the legendary Blazing Saddles restaurant in Heber. It wasn’t long before Tom Burkemo and Jeff Stockman pretty much had me strung out.
Everything about their spinach enchiladas, from presentation to taste, staggered the imagination. And their decaf coffee, aged in Scottish casks, was also top shelf. They, too, would close up shop, leaving me to go it alone, cold turkey. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. Stockman and here’s the rub would go on to mentor the Nacho Mama’s startup.
You feeling my pain yet? What is it about empathy you don’t understand? I’m not going into all this detail just to have you suffer alongside me, although I wouldn’t mind it all that much if you did.
I mean, I could always satisfy my spinach-enchilada “jones” right here at home, but you’d never confuse this joint with the Plaza de Mariachi in Old Town Guadalajara or even Joaquin Murphey’s on Long Beach Boulevard in Compton, for that matter.
Nacho Mama’s emerged in 1988, a wondrous year that also saw an NBA title for the Lakers and, with the help of Kirk Gibson’s iconic game-1 walk-off home run, a World Series title for the Dodgers. As Kirk later mentioned to Dennis Eckersley, presentation is everything.
So, like I said, I’m sitting there with Smokey who, as usual has assumed the role of the sole grown up at the table, and I’m conducting a “dig” into the various levels of heaven officially known collectively in those parts as an Ensheilada.
In the middle of the rapture phase, with my facial hair awash in, mostly, the upper layers the chile verde and the pineapple salsa I began to wax nostalgic. Over the years, there had been plenty of good times and group gropes in the back room at Nacho Mama’s, including not only the previously mentioned “Heberski” dinners but also more than a few employee holiday parties thrown by The Park Record for its staff.
And, of course, it was always the premier pre-show meet-up spot for whatever the Eccles Center had up its sleeve whether high-end cinema during Sundance or art of the performance persuasion during the PCPAF schedule.
So here we are! Another haunt done gone! Great memories and great dishes flying out the door and leaving in their place empty spaces where Ensheiladas and margaritas once performed the macarena with Freda Kahlo. Actually, all of that might not be true. Symptoms of pineapple salsa deprivation are everywhere these days.
It’s about presentation and the absence thereof. It’s about the widest most-welcoming smile known to man and what kind of vibe takes its place when the music stops. It’s about the changing landscape and the “new West.” It’s about not missing your water ’til your well runs dry.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.