Taste of Tucson. Jackie Alpers

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      My Story

      When I was twenty-five, I decided that I needed to find a new place to live. I had graduated from art college the year before and had been biding time in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, hanging out with my friends in the punk rock scene of the early 1990s.

      I was getting a huge amount of parking tickets and took this as a sign that my time in that town was up, so I took a cross-country road trip with my schoolmate, Andy, to figure out where to live. We ended up at a dive motel called The Tiki in a slightly dodgy part of Tucson, Arizona. The Tiki had a tiny pool in the middle of its parking lot, so Andy and I bought a six-pack of Coronas at the Circle K next door and waded in. It was June and 106 degrees.

      As I was sitting in that pool drinking my beer in the clear, bright sunlight with the blue, blue sky that went on forever overhead, I decided that this was the place to be.

      The first thing I ate in Tucson that night was a big plate of guacamole and chips that Andy and I shared from the Mexican restaurant across the street. The place was oddly named “21.” Based on the sign and the dark exterior, I’d kind of thought that it was a strip club.

      Within three months, I’d moved to Tucson, and I quickly landed two very different jobs. One was teaching art to kids in an after-school program, and the other, one that surprisingly ended up altering the course of my life, was busing tables and bartending at El Charro Café, the oldest family-owned Mexican restaurant in the U.S.

      I was inspired by everything that I learned at El Charro and all the new food I experienced, whether it was a salsa made from a chile pepper that I’d never seen before, or a salad that looked like a volcano prepared in a way I’d never heard of. The Flores family treated me like one of their own. I was bumped up to regular waitstaff and eventually learned how to work cooking in the kitchen.

      I began experimenting with Mexican cuisine and local ingredients. I played around with cooking techniques that were completely unfamiliar to me and photographed food and wrote recipes.

      But I never forgot where I came from. I never forgot that I was raised a Jewish girl in Ohio who had never tasted much of this food for the first twenty-five years of my life. I like smoked fish and chopped liver and matzo balls. I like СКАЧАТЬ