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Fairway Market says the cattle may have been sick but the beef tastes great.

The latest Fairway Market flier offers wild Alaska salmon fillet for $9.99 a pound, but doesn't tell you whether it is coho, sockeye or another type.


The Paramus store devotes a full page to its butcher shop and its USDA Prime 21-Day Dry-Aged Beef, but you won't find any discussion of how the cattle were raised.


You can imagine Master Butcher Ray Venezia talking to the people who write the flier:


"OK. This stuff tastes great, because it has more fat than other grades, but it's a living hell for the animals. Hey. That's between you and me, right?


"We don't want any mention of how they are crowded into feed lots in Chicago and other places, and how they're stuffed full of grain, antibiotics, growth hormones and bits of dead animals to get them to grow fast and to turn them into cash.


"Their stomachs are designed to convert grass into protein, so the steady diet of grain can make them sick, and sometimes they collapse and have to be dragged into the slaughterhouse. But again, that's between you and me, right?


"Just call it, 'The tenderest, best-tasting beef on the planet,' and leave the rest to me."


Mama mia


Mama Mexico in Englewood Cliffs was the first fine-dining Mexican restaurant in North Jersey, and it has prices to match.


Rosa Mexicano in Hackensack was the second. If you attended one of its cooking demonstrations, you saw everything was made from scratch using good ingredients.


Now, Mama Mexico is offering 40% off "the entire menu," as well as lunch specials starting at $7.95, through Sept. 5. The coupon was stuck to the Better Living section of The Record today.


Mama Mexico, 464 Sylvan Ave., 
Englewood Cliffs; 201-871-0555.
Web site: High-end Mexican


Bibi'z in Westwood


On June 9, Bibi'z was reviewed in The Record, rating only a half-star away from "Outstanding." Elisa Ung, the reviewer, said all of the food she tried "was fantastic."


Today, a friend whose judgment I trust said, "Don't waste your time."


She said she ordered one of the expensive restaurant's "small plates," and the portion was thimble-sized. 


And she was disappointed in the dish, which was made with chickpeas, even though the Lebanese owner should know a thing or two about them.

In Hackensack, the best restaurant outside of Mexico City?

The dining room of Rosa Mexicano Restaurant in Hackensack. Corn tortillas are made by hand at the counter in the rear.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

We celebrated our son's 13th birthday Saturday night with a wonderful meal at Rosa Mexicano in Hackensack, where we love the handmade guacamole and corn tortillas, and sparkling salsas.


If there is better Mexican food in North Jersey, I don't know where it is served. 

I recall visiting the flashy Mama Mexico when it first opened in Englewood Cliffs, and the food was terrific, but I haven't been back. That restaurant eventually closed.

At Rosa Mexicano, just about everything is made from scratch with good ingredients, and you'll pay for it. 

You'd have to go to Mexico City to find food prepared at this level.

Guacamole

The guacamole for two, made at your table with onion, tomato and jalapeno, is $12 -- and that's for one avocado. 

For a second avocado, you'll pay $12 more.

We treated our single order as an appetizer, and kept on asking for the small corn tortillas to fashion tacos with the two small cups of hot sauce.


We ordered two more appetizers -- small crab empanadas with a mango salsa ($10.75), and a quesadilla with huitlacoche ($8.75)  -- the exotic, black corn fungus that my wife and son ate, though they usually avoid mushrooms. The latter was served with a Mexican sour cream and green salsa.


We shared an entree -- a butterflied, whole red snapper (sans the head), with each half covered in a different hot sauce ($26). 

We couldn't get the kitchen to serve us the head, too. 

Tacos

I also ordered roasted vegetable tacos -- wild mushrooms, squash blossoms, zucchini and garlic -- served with flax-seed tortillas, Mexican street or creamed corn and beans with roasted pumpkin seeds ($17).


We would have been satisfied and full without the vegetable tacos, which seem expensive, and I had to eat them myself. My son ordered dessert -- churros (fried dough) with chocolate and two other dipping sauces ($6.95).

This is one of the most beautiful restaurants in North Jersey, with Mexican pottery, sconces and wall hangings. Service is attentive, but I wish the waiters wouldn't push the expensive, exotic drinks or that second avocado for the guacamole.

Details

Rosa Mexicano, One Riverside Square, in The Shops at Riverside, Hackensack; 201-489-9100. Reservations recommended on weekends.

Rosa Mexicano website

Hungry for a good taco?

After writing about the Rocking Horse Cafe the other day, I couldn't shake my desire for a good soft taco. (See post, "My kind of Mexican food.") I didn't want to go far, so I drove about a mile to Rosa Mexicano in Hackensack for what turned out to be a terrific lunch in a beautiful setting.

I chose the cochinita pibil taco platter, slow-cooked pork shoulder that is shredded and topped with marinated onions. This is a great plate of food, enough for two people to split as an appetizer, and a good value, too ($11.75 at lunch).

The restaurant could call this the Three-Cup Taco. The plate holds a small cast-iron skillet with the pork and cups of red beans and chorizo, fresh corn kernels in mayonnaise and chili de arbol and a spicy salsa. I also got some salad greens, though it would have been more logical to serve fresh cilantro. (When I mentioned this to the waitress after the meal, she said I should have said something.)

I got five or six small, thin, freshly made corn tortillas, which were still warm, and went to town. I placed a small pile of pork and crunchy onions on a tortilla, followed by salsa (I had two others that came with the free chips). Two big bites and the taco was gone. I repeated this until the tortillas were finished and the waitress brought me more, at no extra charge. I washed down my lunch with one of Mexico's great beers, Negra Modelo.

Rosa Mexicano makes everything from scratch and it shows. It serves food that is clearly head and shoulders above every other Mexican place in North Jersey with the possible exception of Mama Mexico in Englewood Cliffs. But I prefer Rosa Mexicano, which stages cooking demonstrations throughout the year and often serves a free breakfast and lunch to the customers who attend.

Of course, what would make Rosa Mexicano perfect would be if its menu told us a little about the origin of the food and how it was grown or raised.

An offer too good to pass over

We just returned from having a free breakfast and lunch at Rosa Mexicano, the gourmet restaurant in the Hackensack mall once known as Riverside Square. This was our third visit for one of the restaurant's cooking demonstrations and later, we were served a three-course lunch of the dishes we saw prepared. As always, the staff gave us a warm welcome, especially nice on a wet, chilly day.

We received handouts listing the ingredients and recipes, and watched the chef, Joseph Preziosi, assemble the dishes, providing cooking tips along the way. Because the restaurant prepares just about everything from scratch, components of the dish were made ahead of time, including the chicken broth. The sauce for the entree has more than two dozen ingredients and requires an hour of cooking.

Today's demonstration was of Mexican Passover dishes, matzo ball soup with jalapeno, a chili pepper stuffed with barbecued veal in a green mole sauce, and a flourless pecan-and-date cake in a butter sauce. About 30 people attended and if you brought a box of matzo, the cooking demo and the meals were free. (Breakfast was orange juice, coffee and scrambled eggs and tortillas.)

Rosa Mexicano opened last August and its generosity is refreshing, especially in view of the struggling economy and declining restaurant patronage. The restaurant is doing this on a large scale, but it reminds me of when Balthazar Bakery opened on South Dean Street in Englewood in 2002. Before its retail store was ready, the wholesale bakery gave away bread to passers-by who noticed its distinctive yellow delivery trucks and the loaves cooling in the open overhead doors.

By the way, the veal-stuffed ancho chili was outstanding and the cake was delicious (I asked the server to give me one without the butter sauce). I liked the Mexican matzo-ball soup, too, but it was a bit salty. We also were served mango margaritas and hand-made corn tortillas.