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Tamale Spaceship Teams Up With 694 Wine & Spirits

By Melissa Wiley in Food on Apr 9, 2012 7:00PM

If you squint hard enough at a sombrero, you can almost see a flying saucer. That’s the intergalactic premise behind the Tamale Spaceship, where you’re served up tasty tamales and tortilla soup by masked luchadores, or Mexican wrestlers, usually in the Fulton Market district during lunch hour. Why the wrestlers? They were the superheroes of these culinary sophisticates’ youth, Batman, Robin, and Justin Bieber all in one. But let’s say you want to see that spacecraft, cannily disguised as a pedestrian food truck, shine in its otherworldly glow after dark. You even want to linger over your complicate tamal de carne topped with oaxacan black mole sauce with a glass of Petite Syrah in hand. Well, you’re in luck, because 694 Wine & Spirits and the Tamale Spaceship pair up every Saturday night so you can do just that.

Like any partnership bridging alien races, this is not a seamless one. The muscled muchachos park outside the chic West Town wine bar at 8 pm, the spaceship sporting a bit of bijou lighting to dress for occasion. The folks at 694, in turn, duly provide patrons with a menu featuring full-paragraph descriptions of sommelier-savvy wine pairings to send off the Mexican space-age fare you’re welcome to bring inside. The integration ends there, however. With the luchadores out of sight in their grounded saucer, the original brio behind the collaboration then gets a bit lost in the Saturday night shuffle.

As it turned out, only a few of the wine recommendations were available by the glass, so we decided to compromise on a bottle that would complement our separate orders, the chicken barbacoa-style tamal topped with Michoacán green-peanut mole and the basic steak. This is where we could have benefited from some superhero assistance and a more robust partnership. Our waitress briskly suggested we go with an Australian red, and we obliged. Sure, our Shiraz worked well enough, but I couldn’t help but think it was a shame that the real luchadores weren’t there to weigh in. Who knows? They may have pulled a Tempranillo out of their back pocket that would have made my green mole shine in a whole new futuristic light. As it was, their preformulated advice in print could only take us so far.

This is the problem, alas, with extraterrestrials in general—they’re not always there when you need them. So we’re not sure we’d visit 694 Wine & Spirits again just to try to link twain galaxies, no matter how closely one is parked outside the other. We would, however, go to great lengths to track down the Tamale Spaceship, wherever it may be in its metro Chicago orbit. We’d likewise stop by 694 to savor a vintage bottle sans gourmet Mexican street food. And at the end of the day that’s really enough, at least on this planet.