You might have seen it on Salida a Celaya! Looking very slick. Looking very much like a chain. And the last thing I want to be linked to is a chain. But I was intrigued. Not as a foodie but as an entrepreneur.

I may seldom eat at fast food chains but I have tremendous respect for them as businesses and my most admired hall of fame includes names like Ray Kroc, Harland Sanders and Dave Thomas.

I did a little online research on Toro Rojo. Only three locations. With three different Facebook sites. And no corporate headquarters peddling franchises. But some pretty slick graphics. So maybe Toro Rojo was or maybe it wasn’t a chain. But who cared?

Toro Rojo calls themself an arracheria and arrachera is steak. And the price for what they called their buffet was only $189 or $199 or $225 depending upon which Facebook site you checked. Any one of the three prices is only about ten U.S. bucks and I’ve spent ten bucks at burger chains.

I messaged Claude Deschamps, another poor old pensioner like myself, who had also recently completed his annual migration from Canada to San Miguel. I told him the price. Lunch was on.

The first thing to greet you upon entering are a salad and a dessert bar. Selection looked decent. Freshness seemed fine. Impressive. I wondered if it was included in the price.

The place looks bigger inside than out and on the right are some high backed wooden booths. Fifties and sixties memories for Claude and I. We snagged one and a woman in an outfit that shouted chain took our order for soft drinks. We looked for paper menus. None. We looked for electronic menus. None. We looked for wall-mounted menus. None.

Ah well, the table was being filled with bowl after bowl of salsas and spreads. We grabbed a chip, dug into the guacamole and began talking about the joys of Mexican living. Ah, but here was the server again.

“What would you like?”

“What do you have?”

The list was long and the server hadn’t been taught the habla mas despacho rule when talking to old snowbirds. I heard three different kinds of arrachera. Regular and ahumada, I understood; arrachera bravura I was intrigued by. There was longaniza, chorizo and another sausage I didn’t recognize. Maybe the English word sirloin was somewhere in there.

“¿Puedes traernos un poco de todo?”

A little bit of everything turned out to be a lot of everything.

The server brought a device to the table that looked like a cross between a seventies fondue and an eighties hibachi and gave me a puzzled gaze as I began humming “Going Up The Country” as she lit the can of Sterno. She returned with a top to the device further topped with what might have been, what must have been, a kilo of meat from the grill.

We started with the arrachera. Still a little hint of pink in the flesh. Nicely seasoned. Marinated enough to take away the chew but not to hide the beefiness. A hint of charcoal smoke.

The sausages. Fine again. And digging down to the bottom of the protein pile, The arrachera now had some grill marks and a little char.

But here was Brenda the server again. “¿Te gustaría una costilla de cerdo?” 

“Would we like a pork rib, Claude?”

“Don’t see why not. Do you think it’s included in the price?”

The rib arrived. And a baked potato. And we’d hardly made a dent yet in the pile on the grill.

“Good rib”, said Claude, just as I was thinking that it might have been the very best part of the meal.

We never did make it to the salad bar. Or the dessert bar. And there was still probably at least  a quarter pound of meat on the grill when I asked for the check. We were stuffed to the gills, wherever on a human body they might be.

The price? $199. I’m not sure I could buy that much meat in a carniceria for $199. I have no idea how Toro Rojo could make any money selling that much meat for $199. And I still don’t know if the salad and dessert is included. But I think it might be.

If Toro Rojo is a chain, burger chains better beware.

Toro Rojo is located at Salida a Celaya 59 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The restaurant is open from Noon to 8:00 pm, seven days a week.