Please note that since writing this blog post, Tio Pepe has closed down
Picture the scene: it’s Friday night, my plans for vintage champagne tasting have been unexpectedly cancelled (I know – woe is me), I have no restaurant reservation… I ask the Honey Badger what he wants for dinner. “How about Mexican?” asks the semi-Texan, optimistically. I mentally run through the options; none are particularly appealing. I hop onto Iens.nl and search for Mexican. And there, right at the top of the list with an average score of 8.1, is Tio Pepe. Alarm bells should be ringing when I look at the address – it’s at the top of the Spuistraat, near Central Station and slap bang in the middle of tourist ville. But we’re tired, hungry, reservation-less people by this point, and we crash on with our sorry plan regardless…
We’re also thirsty people with a mild drinking problem, so we pounce on a couple of margaritas as soon as we walk through the door. It’s rare that I have to force down alcohol, but this was one of those occasions: it wasn’t that the tequila was bad – frankly I wouldn’t know the difference. It was that the drinks were drowning in so much lime cordial and salt that my tongue couldn’t decide whether its sweet or salt receptors were in more shock. In any case, my sour receptor – the one that was crying out for real lime juice – wasn’t getting tickled at all.
“Do you think they do chips and salsa?” the Honey Badger continued, still optimistically. They did, but we had to pay for them. In fact, what they did were tortilla chips that looked like they’d come from the supermarket and tasted like they’d been fried in oil that was a year old. The salsa itself wasn’t too bad, but the guacamole had been served from a piping bag, like pommes duchesse.