“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Who doesn’t love a taco? There is a theory that suggests the word taco comes from the Nahuatl word tlahco, meaning “half” or “in the middle,” which is a great way to describe how food is placed in the tortilla. But taco in Spanish also means wad or plug, and refers to explosives used by Mexican silver miners who wrapped gunpowder in paper to apply charges to get at the precious mineral hidden behind rock. Maybe they wrapped up their sandwiches for lunch the same way? But at the end of the day we really don’t know how the taco got its name, because it is a mystery.
I suppose there is someone somewhere who isn’t a fan of tacos. But if you love tacos and are ever in Kingston, N.Y., or across the river near Tivoli, N.Y. put the Santa Fe Restaurant in your search.
The Tivoli Restaurant is the original and has been going strong since the 1980s. David Weiss started Santa Fe fresh out of the Culinary Institute of America, or what Hudson Valley lovers call the other CIA. Their mission? Great food!
Santa Fe serves up authentic Mexican and Southwestern dishes with a modern flair, for example the aesthetic touch of a piece of watermelon radish that garnishes your salad is both curious and too inviting not to eat.
I am a curious eater and will try anything but an even curiouser, and CURIOUSER thing about my taste which surprised me, happened somewhere back around 2000 when I ordered the shrimp taco for the first time, and with extra sides of the homemade hot sauces. I haven’t changed my order since. Twenty-years! I order the same thing over and over again. At first it was because that shrimp taco was just about the best damn taco I’d ever had. No! Definitely the best damn taco I’d ever had. But then? Every time was as good as the first time… TWENTY-YEARS! Soon the curious thing became a game to see when they might screw it up. They haven’t! Ever! AND the shrimp taco is exactly the same no matter what restaurant you go to: Tivoli, Kingston, or even the latest Woodstock restaurant.
A fun outing is “taco night” which of course is every Tuesday. Joining tables to fit as many friends and family together as possible, along with what feels like anyone who is somebody in the Hudson Valley doing the same thing, all at once. The restaurant becomes a living shell, and people fill it up — in the middle, with all the fixings, surrounded by chips and salsa that get passed around the perimeter with guacamole, margaritas and that good ‘ol restaurant hum of silverware, clinking glasses, and excellent conversation.
HVA
💚🍀
Hudson Valley Astrologer 
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