Cilantro blues

I just saw an ad for a taco that highlights cilantro as one of its main ingredients.

Too bad I'm among the 10% of people for whom cilantro tastes like SOAP. I guess I won't be trying that menu item. Too bad -- it looked good.

I'm a little disturbed by the culinary trend to add cilantro into everything that's not moving. It's one thing to either dodge or put up with cilantro in Mexican cuisine. That's expected, and there are enough other flavors in Mexican cuisine to drown out or mitigate the soap flavor.

But now it seems that every other restaurant has decided that cilantro is their new toy, and they're sneaking it into every farging thing they can. So now I have to read every ingredient on every menu before I place an order, and even then sometimes I get caught in a cilantro sneak attack.

Hint to restaurant owners: uncooked cilantro is way more soapy flavored, so think twice before mixing it into salads.

I wish someone would develop a strain of cilantro plants without the soapy tendencies, so everyone could enjoy the herb. It must taste pretty good to the people who don't detect the soapy factor, since every time I turn around, someone's adding it to something else.

Even so, I wish that chefs would reconsider their tendency to think that everything, everywhere is improved by cilantro, because trust me, for many people in the world, IT'S NOT improved at all.