H & H Mexican Grille

Road-trip hunger has very little patience for theater. We were on our way to an Airbnb, somewhere between where we had been and where we were going to stop, when H & H Mexican Grille became the interruption. That is a useful job for a restaurant: not to turn the trip toward itself, but to recognize when the people passing through need the road broken into manageable pieces.

The Enchiladas Supremas approached the matter democratically—one beef, one chicken, one cheese, and one bean, all under sauce, lettuce, tomato, and sour cream. Four fillings meant nobody had to pretend that choosing one thing was a moral virtue. This was not a tiny composition arranged for contemplation. It was a committee meeting buried beneath one shared agenda, paired with a cantaloupe agua fresca and allowed to get on with the business of feeding travelers.

Across the table, the Trio con Queso made the opposite argument. The Enchiladas Supremas changed their mind four times; the trio put queso directly in the title and declined to sound conflicted about it. A blackberry agua fresca sat beside that decision. Cantaloupe on one side, blackberry on the other: two drinks naming themselves plainly while the plates pursued their own versions of abundance.

There are meals remembered because they were destinations, and meals remembered because they repaired the distance between destinations. H & H belonged to the second kind. It gave the drive a punctuation mark, replaced forward motion with an actual table for a while, and sent the trip back to its proper scale. The Airbnb could remain the endpoint. H & H had already done the more immediate work of making the way there feel human again.