The chips and salsa end up being half the meal at any Mexican restaurant, so they might as well be good. Too often, though, we're disappointed when even the most obscure, authentic Mexican joints bring out little baskets full of what seems like Tostitos. That doesn't stop us from loading up on them anyway. But it does inspire us to make more trips to the wildly popular Manny's, where we'd be happy to make the chips and salsa an entire meal. Servers there always bring out two little white bowls of salsa -- one mild and one hot version of a thick, highly blended, smooth sauce that easily coats the chips. In fact, the mild salsa seems to exist merely as a complement to those chips, which by some miracle are a perfect combination of light and greasy. The hot salsa packs a nice chili burn, but it's not too hot for our gringo palates. Manny's fries up those tortilla chips in the basement of its Southwest Boulevard building. When we asked whether there was some special ingredient, our server shrugged. "Just the grease," she said. But we knew that.
