REAL DEAL: Alice's Mexican Cuisine

You can’t get everything you want at Alice’s restaurant.

Everything else about this hidden downtown spot pretty much lines up with the old Arlo Guthrie song “Alice’s Restaurant”: walk right in, it’s around the back (behind Josh & John’s), just a half a mile from the railroad tracks (actually 0.35 mile, but close enough). And the name of the restaurant isn’t Alice’s Restaurant. It’s actually Alice’s Mexican Cuisine.

But even if you can’t get anything you want, you can get something very, special and rare: real, honest-to-God Tex-Mex made from scratch using owner Alice Ballesteros’s old family recipes and fantastic ingredients. This place is so authentic, it’s museum quality.

The whole thing started about 50 years ago when Alice was growing up on the border in El Paso, Texas, with five brothers and sisters. Her mom made all the hearty meals that became the standards of every Mexican restaurant: tacos, tamales, chiles rellenos and eggs with chorizo.

In the 1960s and 1970s, that now well-known Tex-Mex menu was introduced to the country by a wave of restaurants that simply called the food “Mexican.” Something was lost in translation. A lot of that first wave of taco joints, with their ketchupy salsa and shredded yellow cheese, were nothing like the food in Alice’s mom’s kitchen, nor like the food in Mexico. That started to give Tex-Mex a bad name. People were pretty sure they weren’t getting the real thing. And over time, that original single beam of Mexican dining was split by a prism of immigration and increasingly sophisticated tastes. The result was a rainbow of different kinds of Mexican: dingy taquerias, yuppie mango salsa bistros, northern New Mexican places with blue corn and green chili, Baja-style fish taco joints and made-for-immigrant family restaurants with thick pumpkin seed molés from Oaxaca. Tex-Mex became a slur for that dreadful, proto-Taco Bell Mexican you might get in a school lunch line, with bland ground beef and Styrofoam tomatoes under a toupee of shredded lettuce.

Anyway, it was about 50 years after Alice (Remember Alice?) learned to cook her mother’s traditional Tex-Mex recipes that she got tired of a corporate job she had been working for decades and decided it would be nice to open a little restaurant with her son, John, a trained chef.

But even she doesn’t call her food Tex-Mex.

“I call it Texas border style,” she said on a recent visit.

Don’t split hairs over the name. Just sit down and order anything on the menu. You can’t go wrong.

The tacos ($6.95) are what tacos were supposed to be before the 12-pack of pre-shaped shells — a real, fresh corn tortilla, shaped by hand and fried, then filled with beef or chicken, lettuce and tomato. The difference between Alice’s and the cafeteria line: the beef comes deftly seasoned Texas-style with cumin and garlic and chili powder, and the tomatoes are deliciously sweet and ripe.

The chile relleno ($7.95) comes under a sash of red sauce that’s more tomato and oregano than chile. When combined in one bite with the crispy green chile beneath, it’s a heavenly mix.

“I think that’s my favorite of my mom’s recipes,” Alice said.

The gorditas ($7.95) are another classic border dish: a fluffy fried disk of cornmeal, split in half and packed with the same taco fillings, and crowned with crumbly white queso fresco.

“Some people ask me if they’re the same as at Taco Bell. I take great offense to that,” Alice said.

That’s the thing, though. There’s nothing on this menu you haven’t seen at Chi-Chi’s: tamales, enchiladas, flautas — this isn’t an exotic menu. The setting isn’t particularly sophisticated. It’s just darn good food — a testament to real ingredients and practiced hands. Even the beans and rice that accompany most plates are fresh and deliciously handmade.

Breakfast is best time to see the pains Alice goes through to achieve authenticity.

She couldn’t find decent chorizo in Colorado Springs, or even Denver, so when she needs more of the peppery pork sausage she drives 650 miles to a small meat packer in El Paso, Texas.

Ask for it with eggs on the side of chilaquiles ($7.95) — a traditional breakfast meal in which yesterday’s tortillas are sliced to ribbons, sautéed and drenched in mild green chile.

For desk jockeys running late to the office, the breakfast burritos are cheap ($3.50), huge and served to go.

For the lucky few who choose to linger on the right day, Alice makes the best tres leches cake I’ve ever had. She jazzes up the Mexican sponge cake soaked in three milks (whole, condensed and powdered) with crushed pineapple and a rich frosting. The cake ($3.75) is somehow light and dense at once, and not too sweet even though it arrives in a pool of sweetened cream spiked with brandy.

So maybe you can get everything you want at Alice’s restaurant. Because, frankly, after having it, I can’t imagine wanting anything else.

details

ALICE’S MEXICAN CUISINE

**** (museum quality) Out of five

Address: 109 E. Pikes Peak

Phone: 578-8882

Entrees: $3.50-$9.95

Hours: 7:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays through Saturday; they hope to open for dinner when they get their liquor license.

Vegetarian: Some

Liquor service: Pending

Plastic: Yes

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