Restaurant Review: Girasol Bakery

One of the awesome things about living in the South Slope/North Sunset Park/Greenwood Heights area is the abundance of Mexican cuisine.  It took us a while to get used to it, coming from Tucson where Sonoran, Oaxacan and Mexico City style Mexican food is the norm.  Here in Brooklyn, the restaurants offer not the refried bean-and-cheese laden comfort food of our childhood, but instead a tantalizing array of meat-heavy dishes served with either no cheese or small amounts of a chewy, almost rubbery white cheese.  But it was all smooth, and delicious, sailing once we figured out what to order and what not to (we’ve gotten some pretty wild interpretations of what we consider to be pretty common Mexican fare from cooks who, strangely enough, are Mexican).

With Liz on vacation this weekend, Chris and I decided to check out Girasol Bakery, a place we hadn’t tried yet, but which always seems to be hoppin’ late into the night.  It took us a while to realize that the place even makes hot food, because it is indeed a bakery, with fluffy tres leches cakes piled into the window display.  But the diner-style lunch counter always seems to be crowded with Spanish-speaking regulars who chat amiably with the ladies working behind the display cases.  The women did all the cooking when we ordered, which impressed me, as you don’t often see dainty bakery workers running an oil-spattering grill.  Kudos!

We ordered a Carne Enchilada burrito (beef in spicy sauce), two tacos, one of Chorizo and one of the same Carne Enchilada, and a Pernil torta (Pernil being roasted pork, and a torta a popular type of sandwich served on toasted thick bread piled high with your choice of meat or filling, bean spread, avocado, red onions, some sort of cheese, mayonnaise, jalapeño peppers, lettuce and tomato, with the occasional addition or subtraction, all of which is sometimes toasted in a press, depending on where you go – think a panini with the works).  As the young ladies got to work making our food, we ogled the contents of the pastry case.  We swore to return for the flan, cheesecake, and the huge slabs of layer cake.  But now was not a time for sweets; we had tacos to eat.

We returned to our mansion-like abode with dreams of spicy tacos.  We dove into the pile of what turned out to be way too much food, slathering nicely balanced tomatillo salsa over everything.  The chorizo was nicely seasoned, the pernil was appropriately crackly and fatty, and the bread was just dense enough to support the potentially messy sandwich without turning soggy.  So far my favorite tortas in the area are still the ones at nearby Tacos Nuevo Mexico, but this was still a commendable entry, especially when doused with the aforementioned green salsa.  The Carne Enchilada is also not the best I’ve had (De Guerreros has a pretty mean rendition of the spiced-up beef), but it certainly wasn’t bad.

So I guess I’d be more likely to return for the pastries than for the food, but I give these guys props for running such a complicated operation.  Oh, and they sell Coke and other sodas in glass bottles, the kind that are made with real sugar, perfect when making a rum and coke or whiskey and coke (I think real sugar mixes with alcohol a million times better than the artificial crap).  See, I knew I’d fit drinking into this article somehow!