Restaurant Review: Tacos Mexico

Tacos Mexico presents a dubious face.

A plasticized banner strung outside advertises their breakfast burritos, calling to mind thoughtlessly prepared, Americanized things stuffed with sage sausage and scrambled eggs. And it shares space with one of the half-dozen or so tattoo parlors lined up along Overland Drive.

Walk inside, however, and first impressions crumble into so much dry maize dust.

The little kitchen serves tacos filled with beef, pork and chicken, of course. But the menu also lists cow tongue, chicken neck, intestines and pork skin—secondary cuts that cause many Americans to look askance.

But offal and similar meats often carry intense flavors. Tripe is musty, with an eerie funk. Tongue drags you more deeply into the essence of beef than the most expensive steak. The fat slab under chicharron—pork cracklings, in English—almost gushes with heart-clogging richness.

They are everyday, street style favorites. So it’s odd that folks who will happily chomped down an entire tray of beef testicles will cringe at the thought of chicken neck or a big bowl of menudo.

Tacos Mexico prepares the swarthy soup in house. They also turn out some soulful tacos—neither fancy nor particularly memorable, yet somehow right enough to make the rough dining room feel like home.

So let’s stick to the more familiar marks.

The restaurant’s barbacoa is rough-hewn and simple on its own, just a mass of oozing beef. Toss on some of the chopped pico de gallo and perhaps a squeeze of lime and this savor becomes an earthy foundation. Their pork feels parched and stringy, with reminders that a gritty, subdued broth once stewed over the meat. Again, however, when paired with their pico or a drizzle of their rusty, roasted, adobe-hued salsa, the scratchy meat coughs back to life.

Yes, I’ve had better. That’s not the point. Tacos Mexico is purposefully simple.

Their tostados are a banal mass of common shredded iceberg lettuce, Shur-Fine quality cheese and other pointless ingredients. Yet two touches beg your forgiveness.

Sliced avocado rests on top, for one, adding the fruit’s inscrutable flavor and texture to the mix. More importantly, the beef lurking underneath this mass of everyday ingredients is diced from a roasted cut—no pathetic ground 85/15 meat spiked with “taco spices” here; rather, it’s a grounded and somewhat acrid treasure waiting under layers of sediment.

Step up to the lengua or tripas and the experience will double.

Despite all this, Tacos Mexico is just a quick service taco joint along the panhandle region’s best Mexican strip. It’s hard to suggest a trip here as opposed to El Molcajete, for example. And the menudo at Rosita’s may erase the previous night’s revelries with fewer strokes.

But Tacos Mexico is just what it wants to be—and, knowing that, it’s hard not to be pleased.