Chilpachole

ISLA MUJERES Q ROO MX:

There is this wonderful and charming but homey and humble little family owned restaurante in Colonia La Gloria...

Restaurante La Bruja "The Witch" though I don't think there is anything wicked or particularly witchy about this little restaurant at all!


It is actually rather friendly and inviting...


La Bruja is not fancy, it is a good place for real Mexican homestyle cooking. I have had tacos and enchiladas and guacamole and even nice salads there...it is comfortable and inexpensive and delicious and open from fairly early in the day until fairly late in the evening. I absolutely adore their Enchiladas Suizas (but always eat them too fast to take photos! LOL!)

But I want to write about Chilpachole:


"Chilpachole" is a Sunday morning-only treat at La Bruja, and you really do need to get there before noon, they do sell out of this wonderful seafood stew fast.

From "My Recipes.com" I got that "Chilpachole" is pronounced "CHIL-pa-CHOLE" and not "CHIL-pa-cho-LAY" which was news to me...from "Mexconnect.com" I got that Chilpachole is a specialty of Veracruz, and from both web sites and some other sources (thanks Google!) I found out what I had suspected all along, that most Chilpachole recipes call for crab and shrimp as major ingredients, and all the recipes I looked at also included tomato, garlic, onion and lime, in a chicken or seafood stock. Then all the recipes varied in their use of chiles: guajillo, pasilla, serrano, ancho and morita were some of the chiles listed in the basic Chilpachole recipes.

For me, Chilpachole reminds me a lot of the wonderful Italian Fisherman's Stew Cioppino, also called Caciucco. In fact, it was Caciucco that I enjoyed at North Beach in San Francisco that comes to mind when I savor the Chilpachole at La Bruja.

Rich, spicy (but not too "hot") fragrant stock with flavors of tomato and garlic and the sea...that's Chilpachole at La Bruja...


At La Bruja, they are very generous with the very fresh crab, an entire crab in the bowl, along with rock shrimp, fish, conch and pulpo (octopus). It takes a little work to get to the Caribbean crab meat, but seafood lovers like me know that a little elbow grease makes the shellfish taste even better.


Best of all: two big bowls of Chilpachole, a beer and a coke only cost about ten US bucks total! Imagine how much you would pay for this kind of freshly caught seafood and shellfish in the US. If you could get it this fresh!

La Bruja has a lot of yummy non fishy things on their menu, and I highly recommend trying everything. But if you love fresh seafood, really really fresh seafood, like I do...you have to go there on Sunday, around 10 or 11 am, and try Chilpachole!