Tacorral: So bad it's good

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 4 seconds

The name Tacorral should have been warning enough.

What kind of restaurant gets its name from the awkward combination of a structure and a popular food item?

Would you eat at Burri-tower or Hambur-garage?

But the name might be the Mexican restaurant’s high point, considering the food was as authentic as a Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch, its walls were ripe with stereotypical Mexican knickknacks and its décor could only be described as naco.

After being seated in the sparsely-populated dining room, the first thing that came to our attention was the music. The best way for a fake Mexican restaurant to mask its fakeness is by piping in some authentic Mariachi.

Not Tacorral. Instead of anything remotely Mexican, Tacorral opted for music that sounded like something off The Brady Bunch. In a particular, one of those whacky Brady Bunch scenes where Peter’s science fair volcano display violently overflows, Tiger the dog runs through covered in soap suds and Alice somehow ends up getting a pie in the face.

I didn’t mind the music – primarily brass instruments playing upbeat songs half jazz-half showtune. I loved it, actually. But hearing it at a Mexican restaurant just made the place seem goofy and pathetic.

Amidst the near-neon blue and orange paint, piñatas hanging from the ceiling and serapes and miniature sombreros drooping from the walls, we kicked things off with an order of chips and sauce. When we got our chips and sauce, we discovered why the restaurant had chosen the word sauce in lieu of, say, salsa. Accompanying a basket of taco chips was a smooth red sauce that tasted distinctly like Ortega Taco Sauce. Not that I don’t like Ortega Taco Sauce, but I think if I were serving tortilla chips to guests at my house, even I would be too embarrassed to offer Ortega Taco Sauce.

Next was the main dish, a beef burrito for me. Considering the Brady Bunch music and the Ortega taco sauce, the burrito was exactly what you’d expect. Loaded with cheese, the meat had the distinct and familiar flavor of Old El Paso, the seasoning mix, not the venerable Old Texas town. By regular food standards, it was somewhat tasty. By Mexican food standards, it was laughable. It was at this point that I just sort of felt sorry for Tacorral and its so-bad-it’s-good production of Mexican cuisine.

Upon leaving, I commented that Tacorral was like a Taco Bell where you have to wait to be seated. Because people don’t go to Taco Bell for Mexican food. They go there for cheap, tasty food that happens to served inside some form of a tortilla and has vague connections to Mexico.

A friend who has also visited Tacorral suspects the restaurant is merely a front, citing the reality of white people serving bland, inauthentic Mexican food in a place that by most accounts is always virtually empty.

The only way Tacorral makes sense to me is if someone told two Americans to create a Mexican restaurant in one afternoon. Based on their misguided knowledge of Mexican culture, they’d rely on the clichéd images of piñatas and sombrero-wearing, mustachioed Mexicans catching a siesta while propped against a donkey.

They’d paint the walls colors they thought were Mexico-ish but were more suited for Miami’s South Beach. Their meat would be seasoned via spice packet and each dish would be loaded with cheddar cheese. For some reason the grocery store would be out of salsa, forcing them to go with taco sauce instead.

They’d head to Target in hopes of finding a last-minute Mariachi CD and end up settling on something called Gil Savagio’s Brass Orchestra, based on the false conclusion that his name sounded somewhat Hispanic.

It’s an explanation as good as any.