Is Mexican Rice Always Gross-- Mexican Food Abroad

[MrMan]

I'm thinking if I end up in Indonesia again with some money, maybe I can start several small businesses. I don't want to work in a restaurant, but I wouldn't mind owning one if I could figure out how to make it successful.

My wife and I ate at this Mexican restaurant that has seafood from a specific province in Mexico. The place is always packed with Mexicans. They have either TV or music playing... music I think, and guys going our playing guitars on top of that. The musician part is a bit too much for me. I asked how many tables they had, how many customers they had, took a guess at how much each table earns and the 'turn' of customers, and I guestimated they might make $20 million a year from that restaurant if they have a 50% markup on the food.

Their food is really good. They sell shrimp and lobster, but you can also get fajitas and some standard Mexican fare.

I'm thinking about taking seeds over to Indonesia, working with farmers to grow the specialized Mexican peppers, maybe figuring out if I could co-own a restaurant with these other restaurant owners, or opening little 'warung'-- that's Indonesian for a food tent, or 'rumah makan'-- like a low end restaurant. I can imagine Indonesians going for tex mex tortilla chips with a good hot sauce maybe. I think they could learn to appreciate that. If Mexican food is well prepared, certain dishes might appeal to them. But I'm not sure about the rice and bean dishes. Beans would be weird to them. But introducing low-end beans into the diet, if it caught on as a part of the culture, might offer poor Indonesians another source of protein. They do some pretty good stuff for protein with soy, which is probably a better source than beans from the Americas.

Indonesia already has a lot of food from Mexico-- sambal, which is their version of salsa-- hot sauces made with peppers, sometimes tomatoes. One region even puts in cilantro. They also eat corn sometimes, another Mexican food. They eat pineapples and dragon fruit, and 'tiung' also. But there are lots of varieties of peppers from Mexico that haven't been introduced.

Indonesians like rice, but Mexican rice is probably some of the worst rice I've ever encountered. Gooey, sticky, uninteresting spices. I think there was one late-night food vendor in a neighborhood I lived in in Indonesia whose lousy rice with ketchup in it was on par with how bad Mexican rice is. I don't know if it would go over well in Indonesia.

Is there some version of Mexican rice in some province that is actually as decent as any other country's fried rice?

I had some Paella once, a Spanish rice and seafood dish, at a restaurant at Disney land, and it was pretty lousy, too. The texture was kind of gross, like Mexican rice, so maybe that's where Mexicans get it.

Has anyone had any rice from Mexico that could be imitated-- that is authentic, and that Asians might eat without thinking it's gross?