Mexican food listing

Here are ten Mexican places in no particular order. Some are good and some are bad, others have one or two decent things on the menu.

It is difficult and pointless in most cases to give a place an overall rating, especially when we are talking about blue collar food like this. It bugs me to see food cart critics using a 1-5 star rating when in reality, none of the place in question deserve more than one star; the bell curve strikes again. The best may still not be good, and stars should not be handed out to the tallest midget by default.

For this rating I will simply recommend dishes at each location, and if anything is superb than it will be mentioned further. no stars will be given unless noted.

* very good
** worth a detour
*** worth a trip

Los Taquitos
5832 NE Glisan St
Portland, OR 97213
This place has been in the neighborhood for a few, and so I have been there more than I care to admit. While it isn't the greatest all around, it does offer a few things that i would recommend if you are passing by. The chorizo tacos are pretty good actually if you get them without the cheese; they put that yellow and white pre-grated stuff on everything, yuk! The azada is better than average, i would recommend the tacos or perhaps a guarache (a guarache is like a big streched out tostada). The basic salsas are good and the 'picante' bar is nice; the avocado/cilantro salsa makes up in flavor what it lacks in texture, just a little separated is all I am saying. Most other things on the menu are ok. The carnitas are passable and those who like the the super pineapple al pastor seem to dig this spot.

La Carreta
4534 SE McGloughlin Blvd
Portland, OR 97202
This is your stereotypical family Mexican restaurant which I really despise and many would criticize me for even mentioning this place in a critique. It is true to, this place is ridiculous, but after a few late nights there I realize that they do a few things well. The carne asada is pretty decent and so are the fajitas. The real thing to check out is the margarita. If there is a bartender named Pancho working, he will make you the best margarita using the same basic ingredients as anyone else; furthermore, he will have your drink on the table faster if he is the only one on staff in the bar, faster than if there were a waiter obstructing the process, thats how good this guy is. He is one of the best bartenders I have seen in all my adventures.

La Bamba
4908 SE Powell
Portland, Or 97206
This place is the same format as La Carreta but has no redeeming values. On the two ocations that I have been, the carne asada was burned beyond edibility, and they still had the nerve to come out and put it on the table! The waiter even came out to ask how the food was, you know how waiters do, and when I said that the food was burned, they told me that the money could not be refunded, but only credited toward something else. I just wanted to be out of there; I was already on my second margarita, which repeatedly arrived un-blended despite asking for it to be blended, and didn't feel like sticking around for two more. I asked for nothing in protest and left.

Torres de Morelos
31st and Powell
This place isn't anything special. they are open until 9 which is later than others around and that is the most redeeming quality. I taste too much cheap 'manteca'. The tacos are OK and the gordita is alright somehow. Still better than any actual fast food.

La Serenita
Every time that I have passed by this place or gone in for a bite, it is packed with people eating and waiting in line. The only explanation that I can think of for the popularity, is the fact that it is on Alberta and they are just cranking it out for the dumb hipsters. I have never had a good experience here or really enjoyed anything in particular, maybe after a few beers it would be better, like a bunch of dollar pabst tallboys, jerks. It is all just a soggy mess and the salsa isn't hot. Obviously set up for the cultural sophistication level of the last Thursday crowd; If this is Mexican food, then decorating your bike with Christmas lights is goddamn fine art!

Mumu's
612 NW 21st St
Portland, Or 97209
From 11pm until 2am, Mumu's has a pretty good late night pork taco. While this is not in any way a Mexican resturant, several of the cooks are, and I reckon that this is why the leg or shoulder or whatever, is so good. If they produced some salsa rather than giving you a bottle selection it would actually be a very good experience for this town.

Muchas Gracias (aka La Conga, aka ?)
Open 24hrs, these places are jumping up everywhere so keep current on the closest one to you. This place ain't nothing special at all, but when it comes to 4 in the morning, I could eat a rice and bean burrito sober, where I could not eat any fast food burger at that hour no matter how drunk, thats all. This shift from burgers to Mexican fast food seems to correlate with the rise in sales of salsa vs ketchup as a trend. For the dollar it is just a better meal.

Update/note: When they say "hot or mild salsa?", ask for extra' spicy salsa; rather than giving you only one or two containers, they will throw in six or seven without asking, and it is a hotter and superior salsa all around. It is common for taquerias to have a number of things unlisted, as if it was somehow implied and redundant to list such things.

Ma Tonas
5919 SE Foster Rd
Portland Or, 97206
It is common to see Salvadorian places advertising a mostly Mexican menu like this, as sadly, nobody would go to a Salvadorian restaurant. The pupusa at this place is delicious, one of the rare treats around. A pupusa is like a quesadilla or an non-fried gorda; the number of variations and names of these type street foods are endless. Nothing else is as good as the pupusa but everything is pretty decent, the asada, milanesa, the pollo con hongos was better than I expected, and I've had some pretty decent tacos as well. All portions are quite large.


Taqueria Quetzal
32nd and Hawthorne
The Quetzal taco is the closest thing to a taco "al hambre" around here, steak fried in bacon with a few onions and peppers topped with cheese. It's not bad except for the cheese, the pre-grated yellow and white strikes again. It is a nice change of pace at least from the standard limited selection of meats. The tamale is good too, a wet banana leaf variety. It's worth stopping here if you are in the hood, just to try something different.

Note: No longer at this location. Taqueria neza is now almost where this one briefly was; to be listed on Mexican listing 3.

El Brassero
12th and Hawthorne
Pretty standard. The location makes for lines of hipsters who know nothing of food and have no standards of food in general, and know even less when it comes to ethnic food and culture. The food seems rushed and without love. The tacos have never impressed me, lacking something in texture and body, they do make an OK burrito as it compensates for the form of the meat. The thing that is really good here though is the red salsa, similar to a salsa macha, my favorite!

NOTE: Ten of my 'go to' taquerias are listed in the very first entry!

So to recap for the day, no stars have been awarded. The best things of the places listed above would be the pupusa at Ma Tonas, the Margrarita and asada at La Carreta, the salsa at El Brassero, and at Los Taquitos the asada guarache or tacos, or the chorizo tacos (sin queso).


After I finished typing up these reviews, I went on line to find the addresses of each place and as I googled them the first things to pop up of course were restaurant reviews. As they are listed on the search, one can instantly see the star rating and the first couple sentences of various write ups, from blogs, to city search, or the Mercury for instance. When I looked up La Sirinita, and Torres de Morrelos (for instance; there were others), I was truly shocked and appaled. I mean that I expect these reviews to be poor, but it has somehow reached a whole different level of inadequacy.

Where these two taquerias are on the bottom of my list, they received an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars from individual reviews and local press, what lunacy! What a bunch of tools! On what possible rating system could either of these places receive four stars? Only on the scale of a yogurt! In no way, shape or form do they deserve such praise. If they carry four stars, than La Carreta would be a five star effing restaurant, and as I said it is just your typical family fiasco with the goofy music and mixed drinks that you could drown in, but it still has one or two points over these taqurias. The concept of a four or five star restaurant should be reserved for something special, or at very least something passable, this food is not even of the best in town, nor is it really desirable at all. Four out of ten stars would be getting closer to reality, and even that may be pushing it.

Apart from the absolute shash of the star rating, these dunces felt the need to write down their foolish thoughts about their experience, and sound even more culturally devoid in the process. The most common comment was that the price was really good and that you 'received a lot of food for your dollar.' First of all, this taqueria is the same freaking price as every other taqueria in town, so the thought of mentioning price as a factor is quite a meaningless one indeed; It may be cheaper than the rest of overpriced Alberta, but that is the nature of a taqueria and is hardly a food critique. The same goes for mentioning the volume of food; How could a food review be any less objective than this? Is this to be a weigh in then with no actual bout? Are we handing out stars based on volume and weight of food received? Should food critics go from restaurant to restaurant with a scale and make their determination by calculating the weight to dollar ratio? Or is this an art form? Is a boxing match determined by the weigh in or the outcome of the fight?

One of the worst reviews actually was about how you could get the 'veggie bowl' for only a few dollars 'and be full for days.' What kind of review is this? If you want cheap, you can make enough rice and beans to last for weeks for only a few dollars at home, so to say that rice is cheap is not much of an insight to anything at all, except perhaps their culinary impotence. Second of all, what the fuck is a veggie bowl?!?! How can you even use the words 'veggie bowl' and then 'Mexican food' in the same sentence? This kind of shit makes me so mad, and even more so when white folks give it praise under the mistaken impression that they are actually eating cuisine from another culture. They should just go to taco bell already and stop lowering the bar of food in this town with their hideous tastes, lack of insight, and nonsensical scribblings. I mean a veggie bowl? Can anyone else see how this has nothing to do whatsoever with Mexican food and that it simply should not bear such a name? This is worse than calling our pizza 'Italian' and has more to do with our juvenile health trends, which are ineffective, and consequently cryptonite to authentic Mexican cooking. We get the worst of both worlds as people continue to be overweight and food quality is compromised at the same time. The problems with our food production are not limited to meat, and the health issues that we face in this country run deeper than just eliminating it from ones diet. Our health trends are more of a marketing pitch aimed at over weight people, meant to sell them a product rather than to target weight loss. Diet cola is a good example of this; truly healthy people don't drink cola to begin with, but obese people are sold on it, believing that it will lessen their issue. So for goodness sake just eat some meat and forget about this veggie bowl, this vile creation that surely comes straight from Satan's kettle. Furthermore, getting this veggie bowl is like ordering a cheese burger in a Chinese restaurant, so please, don't be that asshole, and if everyone is eating them, then you are all assholes.

Many more Mexican food listings to come. [photos to come soon, camera is busted]