Vegetarian's Hilarious Nightmare at La Casa De Toño - Mexico City

Hello fellow Steemians! This story is only funny after the fact and although I'm glad I can laugh about it now it has also scarred me me for life ^_^

Here's my story:

After a great trip in Acapulco and Mexico City my partner Jeremy @revolution and I had fallen in love with an authentic Mexican restaurant called La Casa De Toño. We'd been there the night before and fallen in love with their famous Pozole soup, so we decided to go back one last time before we left Mexico the next day.

Just to preface the story, I have been vegetarian since I was 4 years old, and although I don't have anything against meat or meat eaters, it just grosses me out to eat it, so I don't. That being said, I was delighted to find that they had a vegetable option for the Pozole soup. Little did I know...

As of writing this post and looking at the menu pictures, it dawned on me that I must have had too much tequila the first night we went. Somehow I completely missed where it clearly states that this delicacy soup is made with a meat based broth, which to be honest I figured as much at the time, but broth doesn't bother me. What I didn't see until now is that it's actually made with pork, chicken, and... an entire pig's head!

To make matters worse, the tequila got me again with my over confidence in my limited Spanish skills. The menu is printed right under table, so we didn't bother asking for English menus because we figured we pretty much knew what we wanted. I was there for the soup...

But, we couldn't help ourselves, it was so cheap and we just had to order a couple more things. A few innocent tostadas... Jeremy got the beef and I figured I'd get potato or as it appeared on the menu "pata." When the order arrived I immediately noticed that the potatoes seemed rather translucent. I ignorantly thought, maybe it's some special Mexican potato or a jicama... I took my first bite, it was cold and had the texture of jello! I put the fork down and asked the waiter in Spanish "what is it?" he replies confidently, "esta pata." I ask him again, hoping for more details, and he replies in a slightly impatient manner "estan las patas." All I could think to ask next was "esta animal o vegetal?" He replies, "animal" and walked away. I immediately lunged for my phone and did a google search and to my shock a horror, pata directly translates to animal feet, or in this case pickled cow hooves!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here is the offending dish, which I so lovingly took a picture of when it had arrived. I'm glad now that I did!

So one letter different changed potato into cow feet and just for the record:
Pata = Animal Foot
Papa = Potato

I hope you like my post and got some laughs out of my story. I was gagging for days afterwards but had no other ill affects. I'm over it now and it's a funny story so I have no regrets.

Thank so much for reading! xo