CANTINA LAREDO RESTAURANT REVIEW

CANTINA LAREDO RESTAURANT REVIEW

Are you noticing a Mexican theme lately as far as my reviews go? What’s up with that? It’s strange how once I started doing reviews I can see patterns in my eating habits now. I only have one other Mexican restaurant, Taco Lu, that I want to review and then I will be done for a while.

10282 Bistro Drive
Jacksonville, FL. 32258
(904)997-6110

Location: Cantina Laredo is down at the end of the St. Johns Town Center by Seasons 52 and J. Alexander’s.

Food: As far as my Mexican restaurant reviews, this is one of the more high end kind of food. We decided to hit up Cantina Laredo on Sunday afternoon around 2:30pm thinking we should be able to get right in. Nope, 30 minute wait. No big deal, good food is worth a wait. We grabbed our little pager and went to do some window shopping (Note: the pager beeps constantly letting you know you are out of range lol). Before being seated, we checked in via 4square and you get a free Queso Laredo.

How awesome is that? Make sure you try this out, it is great. You can see from the pictures that it has some fresh veggies thrown on top along with some meat. Very, very, good. Remember my complaint about La Nopalera and how long it took to get chips and salsa? Not here. Sat down and BOOM, there they were. You get two salsas. One was cold and one was warm. Both tasty. The chips are on the thin side but well seasoned and fresh. The first of two negatives on this review was the menu.

When handed to us by the hostess, they were filthy. Crumbs and dried food all over it. The menus and the pager system could use a good cleaning, the pager we got was very greasy. Moving on…My wife went with her favorite, the Enchilada Veracruz, which is an enchilada with chicken, spinach and monterey jack topped with a tomatillo sauce, marinated vegetables and queso fresco for $10.49. Check out the picture, it was beautiful.

It was light, tasty and very fresh. It looked like something from a poster. I decided to try something different and went with the Brisket Tacos which was 3 warm corn tortillas filled with monterey jack cheese, beef brisket with slices of avocado, a side of rice and choice of beans…I went with black beans. As you can see in the picture, my dish came out looking sad. Almost no color, the lettuce was wilted and basically just nothing to get visually excited about. Especially compared to my wife’s food. I decided to disregard the visual and just dig in. The taco’s were “meh”.

While the brisket was tender and good, the corn tortillas came out very soggy on the side against the plate. A little soggy, I can take. These were leaking grease through the tortilla itself and made it difficult to eat. For some reason I was expecting more stuff to put in the taco itself. Maybe I’m just naive. The rice wasn’t that great, it was undercooked and the black beans were cold but tasty. I think I will skip this menu item next time.

The Good:
-Enchilada Veracruz
-Free Queso Laredo when checking in via 4Square
-Very fast with the drink refills
-Quick with the chips and salsa

The Bad:
-Dirty menus
-Dirty pagers
-Sad looking Brisket Tacos