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Dining Divas Find a New Mexican Treasure Just Off the U-City Loop
By Lisa Kampeter
It was that time of the year again, the time to celebrate everything Mexican even though we didn’t really understand the reason for the celebration. Keeping with the Dining Divas tradition, we chose a Mexican restaurant in honor of Cinco de Mayo. This year, we chose Mi Ranchito in University City.
The restaurant is located in a small plaza, and this night, the parking lot was packed with cars. With only one parking spot left when I pulled in, I worried that we wouldn’t get a table. Fortunately, the restaurant’s size was accommodating as they had plenty of seating and room.
The Mrs. Robinson Diva took an immediate liking to our waiter and most of the wait staff. Seems one of the prerequisites for being a server at this restaurant is a manicured, bushy set of eyebrows, a feature she tends to like. She couldn’t help but noticed the parade of waiters regularly walking passed our table on their way to the kitchen. We couldn’t help but notice that they easily carried multiple plates of food without trays, sometimes over four plates at once. And we couldn’t help but notice the occasional plate dropping we heard throughout the night.
Leave it to this group to make an issue out of a young woman’s attire. A turtleneck sweater, long pants, a winter vest coat, and flip flops. We had just had record-breaking high temperatures over the weekend so we understood the sandals. But the winter clothes? We decided she must have been from somewhere closer to the equator and unfamiliar with our average temperatures.
We reminisced of past adventures as the Retired Divas discussed new adventures in day tripping. The Non-Cardinal Fan Diva shared with the group her Cards/Cubs weekend in Chicago that went south, literally. Instead of making it to Chicago, they ended up in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. No baseball but plenty of action for this group.
We discussed the High-Maintenance Diva’s first adventure in a beer garden, not a biergarten as she had assumed it was. Gravel, picnic tables, and draft beer were unacceptable, she complained. And she claimed she was tricked into it by the Creative Diva.
It’s not surprising to learn something new at a Dining Divas outing. Someone pointed out a “chifferobe” at one of the restaurants we had been to years ago. Several of us thought she was speaking a different language as we’d never heard of such a thing. And the same happened this Divas outing. Someone was speaking of a shelving unit but called it an étagère. Several laughed because she was referring to a bra instead of a piece of furniture. But there were a couple Divas perplexed as this was yet another word foreign to us.
Typical with Mexican restaurants, they greeted us with baskets of tortilla chips and salsa, and we dove right in. The salsa says a lot about a restaurant, and we liked Mi Ranchito’s. One bowl of the bean dip topped with a white queso sauce wasn’t enough for this group. We followed it up with bowl #2.
This restaurant had the standard Mexican menu with what felt like 20 pages of items from which to choose. We enjoyed chicken quesadillas, chile rellenos, steak nachos, chicken rancheros, chicken and beef enchiladas, and more. One Diva wasn’t a fan of the mole sauce on the enchiladas, but it tasted like typical mole. For the Healthy Divas, the Grilled Shrimp on Rice and Bob’s Shrimp Salad were good options.
Mi Ranchito surprised us. There are plenty of “good” Mexican restaurants closer to home. We expected Mi Ranchito to be amongst the “good” list. It’d be one of those restaurants that we’d go to if we were in the neighborhood but not necessarily one we’d plan to go to again. This wasn’t the case at all. Mi Ranchito surprised us enough that we’d make it a dining destination again. And we wouldn’t necessarily wait for another holiday we know nothing about to come around again.
