Why Sour Cream Might Be A Red Flag In A Mexican Restaurant

There's a certain feature of modern American dining that's been going on for years, if not decades. Namely, that establishments will go to great lengths to convince their customers they're the greatest thing in town by focusing most of their time and energy on crafting the best ambiance or making sure you spend more at restaurants by having the perfect playlist –- all before they think of the food itself.

If you enjoy the bells and whistles, so be it. But if you're eating out because you enjoy food, the quality of the food offered matters. You don't even have to sit through an entire meal before you can determine the quality of a place, though. Take Mexican restaurants, for example. Although it may not seem like a big deal, dishes served with sour cream are a telltale sign that you might not be dining at a traditional Mexican restaurant. If you're looking for classic Mexican food that uses ingredients you'd actually find in Mexico, you have a much better chance with a place that uses Mexican crema instead. 

Mexican crema is sometimes known as Mexican sour cream, crema Mexicana, crema fresca, or crema agria. Whereas sour cream is tart and thick, Mexican crema is thin, fresh, and lightly acidic. Is Mexican crema really that much better than sour cream? Not necessarily, but the use of sour cream is a sign you're eating at a Tex-Mex restaurant and not a Mexican restaurant. Nitpicky it may be, but little details add up.

If you go into a restaurant with some friends and find out there's sour cream on the menu, almost no group is going to respond well to you making a scene about it. This isn't a call to berate Tex-Mex servers about how inauthentic the restaurant's food is or anything like that. This is something you can take note of as you assess the quality of the food and decide if you would want to come back. It's a detail that should be taken into consideration as part of the whole, not as a restaurant red flag that should send you running for the hills.

There are probably many Mexican restaurants that use sour cream that are of high quality or maybe that offer both sour cream and Mexican crema. Additionally, there are Tex-Mex restaurants that make delicious, thoughtful food. That's not really the point. The reason this is even worth bringing up is because low-effort restaurants advertising traditional techniques and regional Mexican cuisine shouldn't be rewarded for lazy substitutions, especially when Mexican crema is fairly widely available and easy to make. 

This wouldn't be as much of an issue if American and Mexican cuisines weren't so closely intertwined. If I told you that Korean restaurants should be using gochujang and not ketchup, the rationale would be obvious. The difference between sour cream and Mexican crema may not be so severe, but the idea is the same. If you want well-made food from knowledgeable chefs, you can and should expect them to be using the proper ingredients.