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Frank Scibelli looks at what's going on around him in the restaurant business, and sees the rapid growth of steakhouses over the past couple of years. He watches the news and sees Americans are eating more beef. So he knows if he wants to stay atop menu trends at Cantina 1511, his regional Mexican-influenced restaurant in Charlotte, N.C., he'd better beef up the meat on the menu.
"The trick is to have something for dinner that Uncle Bob, who doesn't like Mexican food, can eat," Scibelli says. "But you also want it to be as Mexican as it can be, true and realistic." Hence the restaurant's inspired Arrachara, which Scibelli discovered during a recent trip to Oaxaca. In one respect, it's nothing more than a steak (served with mashed potatoes, as a matter of fact). But it's still part of what he's trying to do at the restaurant. "You need to serve something mainstream Americans will eat, but you want to do it right," he says.
In this, Scibelli is not alone. Mexican and Latin restaurant owners and operators are finding new, innovative, and authentic ways to show beef on the menu, and they're doing it in ways far removed from tacos and fajitas. How about skirt steak topped with an egg, a typical dish found in cuisines from El Salvador to Peru? Or the almost infinite variations possible with carne asada, including a Mexican take on the Philly cheese steak?
"Beef is the easiest protein we have to use in a number of ways," says Chris Tripoli, a Houston restaurant consultant who works with companies on both sides of the border. "You can grill a chicken breast five different ways, but it's still going to be a chicken breast. There are more options with beef."
Americans ate just more than 64.7 pounds of beef per person in 2005, according to figures from the Cattlemen's Beef Board. In 2004, there were 11.3 billion beef servings in commercial restaurants, the Beef Board reported. And beef has been the leader in restaurant servings for more than a decade, with consumption holding steady since the early 1990s after an almost 20 percent decline in the 1980s. What's intriguing, though, is that while beef consumption at home has decreased, it has increased at restaurants, according to USDA figures And the department's forecasts call for this trend to continue over the next decade or so.
"You never see much of a change in our Juarez restaurants, but you can see it in the El Paso ones," says Ricardo Murguia, whose family owns six traditional Mexican restaurants called Barrigas — four south of the border, two north. "You can always see the trends in El Paso. It is always back and forth, and right now it's back to beef."
Consumers are eating more beef in restaurants for a couple of reasons, says Tripoli. First, they do feel more comfortable with meat, that a steak every once in a while is not a health risk. Second, they see it as a treat. And since they're eating less beef at home, they're more willing to eat it in a restaurant.
So how can Mexican and Latin restaurant owners and operators take advantage of this back-to-beef trend? Industry experts share the following tips:
Increase quality. This is an opportunity to increase margins, since consumers seem willing to pay higher prices for a better product, Tripoli says. "If you can marinate a typical piece of skirt steak, you can charge $6 more for it," he says, noting that Cantina 1511 uses 800 pounds of skirt steak a week.
It also leads to happier customers and creates a difference between your restaurant and some- one else's. Case in point? At Barrigas, says Murguia, recipes for basic dishes like its version of Arrachiera ($11) call for the outside skirt, a better cut of meat than the inside skirt, which he says most restaurants use.
Focus on authentic, "non-Americanized" flavors. The next big step in Mexican cuisine is to go beyond tacos and tortillas, says Victor Gielisse, a former Dallas restaurateur who now works for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. He says more chefs and more restaurants will follow the lead of Chicago's Rick Bayless (owner of Topolobampo and Frontera Grill, and star of the PBS series "Mexico: One Plate at a Time") and show Americans there is more to Mexican food than melted cheese.
Juan Rivera, who has owned Mata- moros, a Salvadoran and Mexican restaurant in Wheaton, Md., for two years, says customers are surprised by his $12.95 El CampesinoŃskirt steak served with onions, peppers and plantains and topped with a fried egg. They're surprised, he says, because most Americans, accustomed to fajitas and enchiladas, don't know that it's a typical Salvadoran dish.
Be creative. Don't be afraid to take chances, whether it's by serving smaller portions of a beef dish as an appetizer at dinner or turning it into a lunch special; taking a standard cut of beef and augmenting it with a variety of sauces; or even finding a way to turn it into a sandwich, Tripoli advises. After all, who says fajitas need to be served only with tortillas?
Matamoras' variation on a theme: A New York strip served with mushrooms and onions in a tequila wine sauce for $15.95.
Other options: the Margarita Steak with Margarita Sauce and the Latin Lovers Pizza, recipes developed by the Cattlemen's Beef Board and National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The search for creativity, in fact, is what prompted Scibelli's recent field trip to Oaxaca, to look for new, more interesting dishes. A long-time menu favorite at Cantina 1511 has been carne asada tacos, served with asadero cheese and rajas, which, when mashed toget-her is not all that different from a cheese steak. But he wanted more.
So, when he was served the Arra-chara, grilled tableside in a hibachi, at a restaurant in Oaxaca City, he transported the idea back to Charlotte and adapted it (cooking in hibachis doesn't meet code in North Carolina). The result? A $19.95 dish, grilled and served in a cast iron skillet, accompanied by grilled peppers and onions, a spicy tomato salsa and the mashed potatoes. The beef, a piece of New York strip, is marinated in roasted garlic, adobo, salt and pepper, and beef stock (which Scibelli learned was the key ingredient in the Oaxaca City version).
In the end, Scibelli has created a dish that appeals to middle America and remains true to its native Mexican roots. And what chef doesn't want to do just that?
Recipe Reference: Margarita Steak with Margarita Sauce and Tumbleweed Salad