I won’t be with my mom on Mother’s Day this year, as I will be attending an out-of-state wedding that I can only assume was scheduled with the express goal of making me, personally, look like a loathsome ingrate of a son.
While I am busy shattering my own mother’s heart into a billion pieces this weekend, I figured I could at least offer some guidance to the children of gastronomically adventurous moms of Indianapolis. For this week’s INdulge, I offer a brunch recommendation in the form of:
The next dish you should try in Indy
The French may have something of a death grip on the American brunch menu, but there’s one non-European dish that I’d argue beats any number of crème fraiche-laced ouefs. That would be Mexican chilaquiles, which you can find at several daytime eateries including Antojitos Domy in the Crooked Creek neighborhood.
In its most basic form, chilaquiles is a plate of fried leftover tortilla fragments (totopos) doused in warm salsa. This foundational Mexican breakfast is typically furnished with a variety of toppings like crumbly queso fresco, a tangy mixture of heavy cream and buttermilk known as crema and a fried egg or two.
At Antojitos Domy, you can request your totopos bathed in green or red salsa. Choosing between green and red isn’t quite as simple as “mild or hot,” as each salsa gets its color from a mixture of tomatoes and chilies that can vary wildly in spice content. That said, in practice, salsa verde tends to employ a higher proportion of tomatoes while salsa roja usually leans more into the brow-dampening qualities of the Capsicum genus. Being a sucker for the tart, semi-sweet tomatillo, I opted for the green.
The sheer volume of sauce employed by Antojitos Domy leads to softer tortillas than I’d have liked, but I still got a few lovely pockets of crunch buried beneath all that lip-prickling salsa verde. Adorned with two lacy-edged, over-easy eggs and a hammered-thin slab of grilled arrachera (skirt steak), my chilaquiles amounted to a tremendously filling meal for $17. You can opt for a different meat or just stick to eggs if you like; I just find I have a tough time exercising restraint when near-total cardiac obliteration is on the table.
Exactly when chilaquiles hit the scene in Mexico is a subject of debate among food scholars, though several have posited the dish is pre-Hispanic in origin. The Aztecs were eating tortillas and other masa-based foodstuffs long before they had written words, and the arrival of a mixture of crushed-up tomatoes and chilies that Franciscan grammarian Alonso de Molina termed “salsa” in 1571 wasn’t too far behind.
But perhaps the biggest clue that chilaquiles predate Spanish colonization lies in the dish’s name itself. It is widely accepted that the dish gets its name in part from the Aztec Nahuatl words for chille (you can probably guess what this means) and aquilli, which more or less translates to “placed in.” As food names go, “placed in chilies” is about as straightforward as you can get.
Nevertheless, several of the toppings that now appear on chilaquiles weren’t around until the Spanish brought over cattle and goats (and maybe chickens as well, although more recent archaeological evidence suggests Polynesian travelers may have beaten the Spaniards to the punch by a century or so). The chilaquiles of today are undoubtedly the product of prolonged interaction between Native American and Hispanic cultures. Over time, the dish became a breakfast staple in the United States among Mexican American families and at restaurants that put their own spin on the traditional meal.
Of course, I can appreciate that not everyone wants to spend their Mother’s Day afternoon with what feels like a cube of solid tungsten in their stomach because they ate a bicycle tire-sized plate of fried tortillas before noon. But whether you wind up at Antojitos Domy or a more mimosa-oriented destination for your Sunday brunch, you’ll probably have the chance to try chilaquiles at some point. I encourage you to take that opportunity, no matter what fate awaits you in the post-brunch world.
What: Chilaquiles, $17
Where: Antojitos Domy (also listed as Antojitos Domis online), 7940 Michigan Road, (317) 471-8455, antojitosdomy.com
In case that’s not your thing: Brunch-wise, your options outside of chilaquiles include eggs with refried beans, rice and your choice meat or veggie ($10 to $12) or huevos rancheros (fried eggs on lightly fried tortillas with beans, pico de gallo and steak, $12). Otherwise, you’ll find a robust lineup of classics like enchiladas (around $14), mole ($15), pork ribs in salsa ($14) and birria ($20) as well as tacos (about $4 each) and burritos ($12) with more or less whatever fillings you can fathom.
Contact dining reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@indystar.com. You can follow him on Instagram @BradleyHohulin and stay up to date with Indy dining news by signing up for the Indylicious newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: INdulge: Classic Mexican breakfast is next dish you should try in Indy
Reporting by Bradley Hohulin, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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