El Mexiquense

This little gem of a place is one of my favorites for Mexican food that is on point. I have been here 4 – 5 times and every time it is solid! Caldo siete mares, tortas, tostadas de camarones as well as coctel de camarones all very good! Plus once you are stuffed you can roll into the market and buy things to take home to make your own creations. In the market they also sell beer including Carta Blanca which not the easiest to find around anymore but one of my all time favorites as well as liquor if you want to get a tequila/​mezcal weekend started. Enjoy!

Real true authentic Mexican. Redundant, yes, but I had to get my point across. I have eaten here a few times and the food is always great… even better than Durango, in my opinion… including the service. The only gripe I have is about the salsa… it is spicy yet not enough flavor enough for me.

Traditional Mexican. Table salsa is spicy! Seems most of the foods tended toward the spicy side. I can’t handle much spicy, so I ordered the chimichanga upon recommendation. It wasn’t without some spicy and tons of flavor, but for low tolerance for spice, this was soooo good! It was even awesome when I reheated the leftovers the next day!

El Mexiquense is located on a stretch of Lackland Rd. just west of Woodson that looks like the land that time forgot. Hollywood could use it as a backdrop, if they ever decide to mount that long-​awaited sequel to Mississippi Burning. No matter which direction you come from, you have to drive past at least one if not a few similar restaurants. The great La Pasadita is right around the corner. So you’re probably wondering why I would even bother with El Mexiquense, right?
Because I don’t have shit else better to do. Duh! I could just find one place that’s really good (say, Durango) and keep going there over and over again, like an old person, but what if I find one place where the torta is slight better than everywhere else? Or a place where the tacos are just as tiny as everywhere else, but they cost $ 1.69 as opposed to $ 1.89? I’d say that’s worth it. Obviously I’m in need of a bargain. And it’s not like I don’t have the time. I can try new Mexican restaurants while the rest of my generation is off working for a living, or downtown complaining about how they can’t work for a living. Then I can review them for Unilocal and feel like I accomplished something. Bonus!
I’ll take this as consolation for no comprehensive immigration reform.
As it turns out, El Mexiquense does have both really good tortas and tacos that cost $.20 less than tacos at restaurants in places where you aren’t as afraid of making a wrong turn. I only hesitate to say that the tortas are the best tortas of all time because I need to conduct more «research» before I can make such a momentous declaration. I wouldn’t want to say that and then come to find out I was wrong. I take this that seriously. And I only recently started fucking around with a torta. It took me a while to convince myself that I should bother with something that looks like some unholy cross between garbage American fast food, a la the fare at Jack in the Box, and a taco. Didn’t Taco Bell try to introduce something like that back in late ‘80s?
You’re best off just dispensing with your standards and ‘80s nostalgia and biting right into one of these things. Pause. I’d recommend showing up very hungry, because these sandwiches — unlike the authentic Mexican taco — are fucking ginormous, and because that way your less likely to think about what you’re eating and how bizarre it looks. It’s essentially your choice of taco meat, from a list including all sorts of shit, from the relatively pedestrian steak and chicken all the way down to meats that come from organs that I don’t know and I don’t want to know, topped with shredded rabbit food lettuce, tomato and a shedload of mayonnaise, on a roll roughly the size of a football. Maybe even larger than a football. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m exaggerating here. I’m not.
They’re served along with fries in a big-​ass white styrofoam container. Normally I don’t even bother to write about the fries, because I can get rather loquacious when I’m discussing delicious fast food and how it relates to some of the choices I’ve made in life, and because who gives a shit anyway. They’re only remarkable when they’re either really good or really bad. The fries at El Mexiquense are really good. They’re very similar to the fries at Bandanas, of all places, but they’re lightly (very lightly — tastefully, even) dusted with some seasoning that I’m pretty sure isn’t just salt. But I don’t know enough about seasoning to say for certain what it is. I’d ask Guy Fieri, who always seems to know what something’s seasoned with, but I don’t know him like that.