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Thursday, January 22, 2004

Rules no bueno for Mexican favorites

By VALERIE WHITNEY | News-Journal Business Writer

DELAND — New beef rules formulated because of the mad cow disease scare mean Mexican restaurants can no longer serve such traditional dishes as tripas.

Depending upon the age of the cow, the same can be said of taco de sesos, another popular dish.

Tripas consist of deep-fried chunks of small intestines that are folded into tortillas with onions, cilantro and lime. The taco dish is made with cow brains.

Fortino Mendez, owner of El Taco Loco, 620 S. Woodland Blvd., said he stopped serving tripas a couple of months ago, well before the government ban.

"It was a lot of work to prepare and cook," Mendez said, explaining his reason for pulling it from the menu at his eatery which opened about six months ago.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service recently issued several new rules to further enhance safeguards against bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease.

Among other things, the agency declared the tonsils and small intestines of all cattle as inedible and prohibited their use for human food.

Furthermore, the skull, brain, eyes, trigeminal ganglia, spinal cord, portions of the vertebral column and the dorsal root ganglia of cattle 30 months old and older were ruled inedible and prohibited as food for humans. Skulls from older cows also will no longer be able to undergo a process known as advanced meat recovery, which uses machinery to scrape meat from bone. The government has raised concerns about the method because of the possibility that nervous system tissue, which may contain the disease, could get into the meat.

Mendez, however, doesn’t sell the brain tacos. Neither dish apparently is on the menu of most area restaurants that specialize in Mexican food.

“Once in a while, you get a request for these dishes,” said Henry Galvis, owner of Maria Bonita Authentic Mexican Restaurant, 1784 S. Ridgewood Ave., South Daytona.

Galvis said he offered tripas on his menu years ago as a specialty entree but found little interest among his customers, most of whom are not Mexicans. Since then, the only time the dish is prepared is for family meals, he said.

Diners at La Hacienda Mexican restaurant, 242 Palm Coast Parkway, Palm Coast, also can’t order tripas or tacos de sesos, owner Fernando Lopez said.

But, workers have enjoyed it from time to time, Lopez said. “We make it for us but we don’t sell it.”

The mad cow scare, meanwhile, seems to have had little or no effect on other restaurants that prominently feature beef on their menus.

“I thought it would hurt but it really hasn’t,” said Dan O’Donnell, chef at Gene’s Steak House, 3674 W. International Speedway Blvd, Daytona Beach.

Customers are still ordering steaks, O’Donnell said in a recent telephone interview.

On the plus side, he said, the price of beef, which had skyrocketed, has come down. “That’s a good thing.”

Kerry Hinckley, a manager at the Highlander Restaurant, 1821 S. Ridgewood Ave., South Daytona, said some customers have asked where the eatery gets its beef.

Otherwise, Hinckley said, it has been business as usual. “It hasn’t affected us much. Our sales have been normal,” she said in a recent telephone interview.

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