In the following passage, James Michener describes a meal at a Mexican restaurant in the small town of Centennial, Colorado in 1973, before Taco Bells dotted the landscape.
We turned east on Mountain and walked four blocks to a noisy restaurant called Flor de Méjico, and there again we were warmly greeted, this time by a robust Mexican introduced to me as Manolo Marquez. "We knew you'd be back," he told Miss Endermann. "Tonight the best in the house, on me."
He showed us to a table covered by a red-checkered cloth and a well-greased menu which Miss Endermann told me had been invariable for the past five years. "I hope you like Mexican food," she said.
"It's not common in Georgia."
"We'll introduce him to it, Manolo," she cried. "Three plates, with a sample of everything. And some Coors beer." She asked if I knew this Colorado beer, and I said no. "With Mexican food it's sort of heaven," she assured me.
The door opened and the black man I had seen on the street entered and came to our table. Miss Endermann kissed him, then said, "This is my friend and counselor, Nate Person. Not only a good barber but a sagacious one. He knows where the bodies are buried."
Person, a gray-templed man in his fifties, asked where I was from, and when I said Georgia he laughed. "That's a state not high on my list."
"It's getting better," I assured him.
"High time," he said evenly.
"You must tell him everything you told me," Miss Endermann said, and Nate nodded.
I suppose it was a good dinner, but the items that faced me were so unlike what I was accustomed to in Georgia that it all tasted like a hot jumble. "The toasted thing is a taco," Miss Endermann explained. To me it was more like French-fried cardboard, and the enchilada and tamale seemed so nearly identical that I never did discover which was which. The stuffed pepper, called a chili relleno, was mostly fried cheese, but the salad was great. So was the small glass of pomegranate juice. And the Coors beer was, as she had predicted, "as light as a cupful of mountain water."
After we had finished the dinner, which Miss Endermann and Person gulped as if they hadn't eaten in weeks, I began to experience the most pleasing sensation. It was as if my stomach were in harmony with the world. "That must have been pretty good food," I said. "Tastes better now than it did going down."
"Join the club," Miss Endermann said. "Nate, remember that first time you made me try it? Thought I'd die."
- From James Michener, Centennial: A Novel (Random House, 1974)
