After the abuse I received after my last two posts about In N Out and pretzels, I have decided to review a restaurant that you probably haven’t been to before so you can’t possibly be angry at me.
As far as restaurant themes go, hell doesn’t seem to be the best idea, but Torchy’s Tacos doesn’t care. The employees all wear t-shirts adorned with cartoon devils, the door handles are red pitchforks, and the walls are covered in fiery paraphernalia. Luckily, devils leave Jewish people alone and focus on the sinning Christians, so I felt quite comfortable. The image of the devil the restaurant uses is pretty strange and kind of looks like one of those old-fashioned racist caricatures of some race that doesn’t yet exist in the United States.
This is one of those semi-service restaurants. You go up to the front and order, but they bring you your food. Nifty. I ordered two tacos: The Trailer Park and the Republican. My friend, Brent, recommended them to me though I ignored his recommendation of ordering the “trashy” Trailer park which would’ve replaced my lettuce with queso. I decided to eat the Republican (ha) first because it seemed like the one I would like less. The Republican was made up of a grilled jalapeno sausage, shredded cheese, pico de gallo, and poblano sauce all on a flour tortilla. It was pretty good. One thing I’ve learned over my time on Earth is to replace the word sausage with “hot dog”. To me, most sausages just taste like hot dogs. I would never eat a hot dog without a bun, because the best part of the hot dog is every part that is not the meat. I feel pretty much the same about sausages and this taco. The meat tasted hot-dog-like but everything else was good enough to nearly mask the hot-doggy flavor. Plus, it was only $3.25!
I ate the Trailer Park second. I was fully expecting to enjoy it more than I enjoyed the Republican, and as usual, due to my high IQ, I was correct. The Trailer Park (fried chicken, green chilies, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese) sounded much more delicious than its housing-related namesake. And in the end, it definitely was better as the fried chicken showed the dead cow who’s boss.
Eating at Torchy’s Tacos was a strange experience. As I sat waiting for my food, I was constantly batting away 6 or 7 different flies which seemed to be attracted to my strong calf muscles and fresh haircut. Since this was an indoor restaurant, this swarm was pretty unexpected. On the *~aesthetic~* side, the employees all wear Torchy’s themed t-shirts, but they were all wearing different t-shirts so it was sort of hard to tell who was working and who was just preparing to shovel down food. The most incongruous part of the restaurant was this hipster soda machine that sold Maine Root brand sodas. Considering the restaurant décor and vibe was pretty much the opposite of trendy, the presence of “texas wild harvested prickly pear cactus juice lemonade” was as befuddling as people who eat hot dogs without buns.
The Republican: 6.6/10
The Trailer Park: 7.4/10
Restaurant as a whole: 7.2/10 (cheap and pretty good)
