Restaurant Review: Empellon Tacqueria

I went out to Empellon Tacqueria with a large group of girls for one of our monthly dinner adventures. I had heard mixed reviews about this place, and I have to say I feel mixed about it myself.

The space is on the smaller side and they definitely pack in the tables in here. It's a good place for groups since they have a couple of larger tables. Unfortunately, our table was right in front and directly in the path of the freezing air that rushed in every time the door opened (which was often, since it was a busy night). We also were sandwiched between the bar area/walkway to the restrooms and the other tables/walkway to the exit. So, our central location put us in a place to get bumped a lot by people trying to get by, and also allowed all of the sounds to pass through making it really loud and hard to hear anyone but the person next to you.

Now that I sound like an old fart that can't hang, I will move on to the drinks and food. We ordered some margies and beer (I got this adorable "Baby Sol" which was a mini beer) and a couple of guacs + 7 salsas, which is all of the salsas on the menu. The guac was good, once I removed the cilantro! And the salsas were fun. They came in small dishes displayed around the guac in order of spiciness. #1-#5 were good, #6 was really spicy and #7 was insanely HOT, so thank god I only took a very very small taste. I don't know where in the spectrum this one fell, but I especially liked the smoked cashew and chipotle one.

Baby Sol

Guac + 7 Salsas

For dinner, most of us got a variety of tacos, since we were at a tacqueria after all. The tacos come in orders of 2 or 3, and one taco will run you ~$6-$8 each. We all pretty much went splitsies and I ended up with the lamb barbacoa with cucumber and salsa borracha, skirt steak with mojo de ajo, and duck confit with loganiza (type of sausage), avocado puree, red onion, and habenero.

The lamb was my favorite of the three. It was pulled, which was interesting and worked well as a taco. I don't think I have ever had lamb prepared that way, and the cucumbers gave it a nice crunch. My least favorite was the skirt steak. It was cut into chunks and while I know skirt steak is normally on the chewy side, this was just a little too tough and fatty for me. It was hard to bit into as a taco, so I ended up trying to eat just the steak out of the tortilla, but that wasn't working either so I just gave up on that one. The second runner up was the duck confit. It took a few bites to actually find the flavor in this, meaning the duck itself was not seasoned very well, but the other stuff inside helped keep it alive.

Left: Lamb
Center: Skirt Steak
Right: Duck Confit

Conclusion - I probably won't be coming back since I really did not like the ambiance and the food did not help Empellon's case either. You win some, you lose some!