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We're off tomorrow night to try an "upscale" Mexican place that looks good on paper.

Home - Casi Cielo Cocina Mexicana | Atlanta, GA (casicieloatl.com)

We dined at "Bones" last week, a sort of a landmark kind of place, expensive, and probably don't feel a need to return.

Going to try again to get reservations at the Gun Show maybe next week.

Really fine Mexican food often is hard to find.  The places up Buford Highway may be authentic (or not), their patrons are largely Hispanic, but the food isn't what I'd call fine.  It's good and cheap.  I've never had upscale Mexican, and this place says it's Oahacan "inspired".

Really fine Mexican food often is hard to find.  The places up Buford Highway may be authentic (or not), their patrons are largely Hispanic, but the food isn't what I'd call fine.  It's good and cheap.  I've never had upscale Mexican, and this place says it's Oahacan "inspired".

Not hard to find here.  There's interior Mexican and coastal Mexican and Northern Mexican and Southern Mexican all over the place.  Jalisco, Oaxaca, Yucatan styles.  Some of it they call fine dining, some they don't.   They all use fresh ingredients, main difference I've found is the fine dining ones use catch-phrases like "locally sourced" or "farm to table" so they can charge more.  It's all pretty darn tasty.

So, it was good, but not great.  It was crowded and a bit noisy for my tastes, a happenin' kind of place.  The bar was packed with maybe 20 people.  I had a steak which was pretty decent, just nothing unusual really, to me.  The wife had fish tacoes of some sort, said they were good.  I had a predinner mixed drink that was interesting and a glass of wine and the wife had a glass of wine, that pushed the final bill over $100.

We agreed it was good but not worth the drive (which ran into serious traffic expectedly and some heavy downpours).  I think I enjoy the Buford highway places about as much and they are full of Mexicans, and pretty cheap, and about the same drive for us.

We have a place near us called Tin Lizzy's that is acceptable, not great, but OK.  And we fix our own tacoes fairly often with leftover steak or chicken or fish.  The wife bought some colorful taco holders that work pretty well.

Some cuisines are impossible to fix at home without considerable skill of difficulty, Mexican does not seem to be of that ilk.  Nor is steak in my view.  I can get a nice porterhouse at our local butcher shop (walkable) for $25-30 and grill it myself and split it between the two of us and have leftovers.

For tacoes.

My curiosity is what "upscale" Mex is like.  I know what upscale French is like, and Spainish, and Italian, Chinese, Thai, Indian, even American.  We have two fairly upscale Indian places near us and they are markedly better than "ordinary" cheap Indian places I've dined.

It's a bit like going to Bones, tres cher indeed, but I was curious about it.

Going to a Japanese place tomorrow night, Nakato, much closer to us.