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Tacodeli has never felt more complete: By the end of the month, Austinites will be able to experience dinner at Tacodeli in a whole new way with an expanded menu and alcoholic drinks.
One of Austin's favorite spots for tacos, Tacodeli is adding five dinner menu items and eight alcohol options available at all its locations after 4 p.m. daily. Cocktails are available to-go.
(Tacodeli)
New dinner items include:
- Pastor Yucatan: Pastor pork served on top of banana leaf and garnished with red onion escabeche, served with black beans and Mexican rice
- Mole de Pollo: Chicken in mole sauce with crumbled queso fresco and sesame seeds, served with black beans and white veggie rice
- Escalopas Especial: Seared scallops garnished with seasoned cashews, served with sauteed spinach and a cauliflower puree
- Arrachera Flank Steak: Mojo garlic-seasoned flank steak topped with Mexichurri garnish, served with black beans and Mexican rice
- Esquites Mexican Street Corn with diced red onion, queso fresco, cilantro and bacon bits
- Tacodeli Frozen SenoRita: Made with 100% blue agave Mont Alban Plata Tequila mixed with a blend of organic cane sugar, Paula's local orange liqueur and fresh-squeezed lime juice. Topped with Southern Spice's all-natural salt rim and lime.
- Tacodeli SenoRita on the Rocks: Made with 100% blue agave, hand-harvested el Jimador tequila mixed with a blend of organic cane sugar, Paula's local orange liqueur and fresh-squeezed lime juice. Topped with Southern Spice's all-natural salt rim and lime.
- La Dama Paloma: Freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, El Jimador silver, lime juice, citrus bitters, and topped with Rambler's grapefruit sparkling mineral water. Topped with Southern Spice's all-natural salt rim and lime. 12 oz / 16oz to-go
- SenoRita Swirls: Made with their frozen margarita and blended with your choice of made from scratch agua frescas
- Watermelon Swirl Frozen SenoRita: Crafted with house-made sandia agua fresca. Topped with Southern Spice's all-natural salt rim and lime.
- Horchata Swirl Frozen SenoRita: Crafted with house-made horchata agua fresca. Topped with Southern Spice's all natural salt rim and lime.
- Seasonal Swirl SenoRita – Basil Pina
- Local beers and new canned cocktail Epic Western, made with 100% blue agave tequila, mineral water, salt and lime, are also available
(Tacodeli)
Since opening its first location in Austin in 1999, founder Roberto Espinosa has blended his Mexico City roots with Austin flavors to develop the menu loved by many today; it has also expanded to the Dallas and Houston markets, which will also offer dinner hours and alcoholic drinks at select locations.
"As we grow as a restaurant company, we continue to focus on providing our guests the best quality sourcing and preparations. We are thrilled to introduce vibrant new alcohol and dinner menus that we hope our guests find as exciting as we do!" Espinosa said.
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(Pexels)
Our 15-year-old granddaughter and her sister, 12, have spent summer weeks with us, usually separately so that we could better get to know each individually. In visits focused on Austin and Port Aransas, the girls seemed to be developing an affection for Texas.
Houston and Dallas are two great American cities, the 4th and 9th largest, each loaded with cultural treasures, each standing in glittering and starchy contrast to Austin’s more louche, T-shirts and shorts ways.
Three hours up I-35, Dallas loomed before us as a set of gray skyscrapers in a filmy haze, accessed only through a concrete mixmaster of freeways, ramps and exits. I drove with false confidence. Be calm, I said to myself, it will all end in 10 minutes under the hotel entrance canopy. And it did.
The pool at the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. (Crescent Court Hotel)
We stayed three nights at the Crescent Court Hotel ($622 a night for two queens), a high-end hotel in Uptown, patronized by women in white blazers, business people in suits, and tall, lean professional athletes, their shiny Escalades and Corvettes darting in and out, and other celebrities like Bill Barr, the former attorney general who shoe-horned his ample self into a Toyota.
Each morning as I walked to Whole Foods for a cappuccino, a fellow identified by a bellman as Billy the Oilman arrived in his Rolls Royce Phantom. Where does he park? “Wherever he wants to. He likes the Starbucks here.”
We garaged our more modest set of wheels for the visit. We were chauffeured for tips by Matt Cooney and Alfonza “The Rev” Scott in the hotel’s black Audi sedan. They drove us to museums, restaurants and past the enclaves of the rich and famous. In Highland Park, The Rev pointed out the homes of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and Troy Aikman along with the family compound of the Hunts, oil and gas tycoons.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Cartier and Islam” exhibit (until Sept. 18) attracted an older crowd; the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science was a powerful whirlpool of kids’ groups ricocheting from the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the oil fracking exhibit. Watch your shins.
A Geogia O'Keeffe oil painting called "Ranchos Church, New Mexico" at the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art. (Rich Oppel)
For us, the best museum was the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, a 50-minute, madcap drive away via a 75 mph toll lane along I-30. Don’t try it during rush hour. The Carter has an exquisite collection of Remington paintings and sculptures and an excellent array of 19th and 20th-century paintings as well. Pick one museum? The Amon Carter. Peaceful, beautiful, uncrowded, free admission and small enough to manage in two hours.
The Fort Worth Stockyards, a place of history (with a dab of schmaltz), fun and good shopping, filled one of our mornings. The 98 acres brand the city as Cowboy Town, with a rodeo and a twice-daily (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) cattle drive. We shopped for boots, drank coffee and watched the “herd” of 18 longhorns. So languid was their progress that if this were a real market drive the beef would have been very tough and leathery before it hit the steakhouse dinner plate.
The cattle drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards. (Rich Oppel)
But we could identify: the temperature was 97. “I saw a dog chasing a cat today,” said the emcee, deploying a very old joke. “It was so hot that both were walking.”
With limited time, we chose three very different restaurants:
- Nobu, in the Crescent Court Hotel; Jia, a modern Chinese restaurant in Highland Park; and Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Nobu’s exotic Japanese menu set us back $480, with tip, for four (we had a guest), but it was worth it.
- Jia was an ordinary suburban strip mall restaurant, but with good food and a reasonable tab of $110 for four.
- Joe T.’s is an 85-year-old Fort Worth institution (think Matt’s El Rancho but larger), a fine Mexican restaurant where a meal with two drinks was $115.
Sushi at high-end restaurant Nobu. (Crescent Hotel)
It was all a splurge for a grandchild’s visit. Now we will get back to our ordinary road trips of Hampton Inns, where a room rate is closer to the Crescent Court’s overnight parking rate of $52. And to corner cafes in small towns.
Did Dallas change our 15-year-old’s view of Texas? “Yes. I think it’s a lot cooler than I did. The fashion, the food.” So, not only Austin is cool. Take Texas as a whole. It’s a big, complex, diverse and wonderful state.
