The salsa at this Mexican restaurant in Macon just might be the best in Middle Georgia
Editor’s note: This article is part of an occasional series — “Middle Georgia Delicacies” — bite-size homages to fine food offerings, from the unsung to the iconic, at eateries across our region.
Fresh salsa may be the perfect dip. The perfect pour-on-top-of-whatever-Mexican-dish-you’re-eating condiment.
And the perfect salsa may well be the house variety at Margaritas Mexican Grill in Macon’s Mercer Village.
If you consider salsa a mere on-table freebie, an appetizer afterthought to dunk your tortilla chips in while you await the sizzling arrival of your fajita platter, well, you probably squirt ketchup on your tacos.
A fine salsa is, dare we say, sippable. A texture-rich soup of herbs. A goulash of garden freshness.
A great salsa cha-chas on the tongue. Cool. Spicy. A raw tang of easy heat.
As most Southerners know and tend to prefer it, salsa, which in Spanish translates to “sauce,” is red-tomato rich. At Margaritas, it is a holy union of whole, peeled, canned tomatoes and tomato fillets, canned jalapenos and their juice all blended with onions, cilantro and seasonings.
The salsa at Margaritas borders on a relish: not quite liquid, not quite mush. Some places “make it too chunky and some people make it too watery,” says Margaritas proprietor Valerie Cork. “Some people grind it up too much.”
She and her husband Brad run the restaurant. They have traveled the country tasting other salsas and, well, they like theirs best.
“It’s not just bias. I always say, hands down, our salsa is the best. ... I am very proud of it,” Cork says. “The spices are always the same, and the reason is I pre-bag my recipes.”
For consistency. That way the people who prepare them in the kitchen get the proper amounts of garlic, salt, pepper and other ingredients in each batch.
Cork is a descendant of local Mexican restaurant royalty. Her father, Rafael Rodriguez, and his business partners established Macon’s popular El Sombrero eateries. Her mother’s family, the Maciases, founded El Toro restaurants that took root in metro Atlanta and by the late 1980s were the largest chain of their kind in that region.
Brad Cork credits his wife’s family for its four-decade mastery of the salsa recipe.
“They created and perfected the recipe, and they’ve maintained it,” he says. “We’ve got (Mercer University) students from all over the world. They and their parents will come in and say, ‘It’s so good. I wish we could get it at our hometown restaurant.’”
