This is a country short on sour cream, cheddar cheese, tortilla chips, avocados and 100 per cent pure ground beef.

How is a gringo supposed to get some good Mexican around here?

Surprisingly, we have found a place that can fake it pretty well. At El Corazon, they know how to slop the dishes with enough picante or hot peppers to make you forget you're really just eating Bulgarian food.

The restaurant's knack for improvisation and versatility actually starts with the decor. The stone stairwell winding up to El Corazon is lined with a funky mural that announces you're in Central America, sort of. And though we enjoyed our lunch date here with a group of amigos, the bar-like atmosphere made us want to return at night, too, for beers and live bands.

Arriving first on our wooden picnic tables were the inventive salads. The taco salad, a fiery, meat-heavy mound of picante, peppers, beef, corn, tomatoes and white beans, was crowned with what appeared to be three barbecue-flavoured Chio Chips. Smack in the middle was a lump of dried yoghurt, a scrumptious stand-in for sour cream that we couldn't get enough of. The shopska salad here is spiced up into a kind of `salsa shopska', with the addition of scallions and roast peppers. The house salad, meanwhile, with tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and cabbage, gave us a new respect for beets, and the pickles of the Karoi salad gave a great tang to its potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and eggs.

We didn't see how things could get any better, until we tried the Mexican version of Bulgarian chushki burek. Traditionally, these are formless blobs of fried eggs, white cheese and sweet peppers. But the little bundles we got were divine cheese rounds coated with egg and centred with hot peppers. Just serve them warm next time, por favor.

When we needed a siesta from the five-alarm fare, we moved on to some non-Mexican entrees. The mushrooms with yellow cheese, sauteed in butter and maybe white wine, were gloppy but good. Although we didn't detect any ginger in our ginger chicken fillet, the meat wasn't the tough old bird we often get off Bulgaria's grills. If you can resist finishing off the meal with dessert (the choices here include tiramisu, fruit praline and assorted creams), you can keep your tab under eight leva a person.

After all this, we'd really like to tip our sombreros to El Corazon. Only, this country doesn't have any of those either.