The Best Dessert in Town -- at Agave!

I'm really not kidding.

I've been looking for this since Oaxaca, 1991. A real flan. With real cajeta, the dolce de leche caramel heaven made from goat's milk (usually condensed). Agave's flan is rich and dreamy and way beyond the offensive flan-in-a-sombrero caricature we're subjected to around here. And because Agave is Agave there's tequila in there, too. Anejo, to be specific, which I'm told is aged for a year in small oak casks. Wait until you get a whiff of the swirly sauce of cajeta and tequila the lovely little custard allows itself to sit upon. Just wait.

Agave is on Manchester in The Grove

I remember lingering at an outside table, in a restaurant on the zocolo in Oaxaca town, writing a poem, trying to capture the essence of what my time there felt like: the blues and the greens, the iron-caged doors, the gardenias, little children, all of it. And I ordered a flan to go with my cafe con leche and it came out on a plate, as a slice, with caramel sauce, and from the first bite I knew I would never capture the sublimity of that moment in any poem. I just couldn't; I wasn't talented enough. So I ate it really, really slowly, and forgot everything else. This flan at Agave will take you close to there if you let it. But with a small, sweet tequila kick, and its own little mystery. Honestly, it's pretty hard to get my attention like this. The last time was Natalia's Bienmasabe cake and that was, I don't know, two years ago or something.