| rev:text
| - The newly opened Martinez Taco Bar is a family run joint located in the Aliante area, just East of the 215. Inside the restaurant you'll find a handful of tables, a couple booths and the counter with built in salsa bar and a somewhat open kitchen behind it. For as big as this location is, the dining area is fairly small but luckily, additional seating can be found outside.
Alongside traditional items like tacos and burritos, MTB is also serving up some surf 'n turf options, signature tacos and even burrito bowls. Pricing is similar to other taco joints with tacos ringing in at $2, vampiros at $4 and burritos at $7. It appears that they run specials, or plan to at some time as there was a white board in the window with prices that didn't match either the menu, or their hand written chalkboard sign inside.
Of course I had to try their al pastor! For whatever reason, the spit wasn't going and I assume they pre-cut the meat. If you prefer nice, thin slices of al pastor, you won't find it here. The meats cut chunky and it's also pretty crispy, almost to the point of being burnt. Flavor was okay but nothing great and because it was overcooked, it was a bit dry.
In hopes to sample some other meats they offer, I ordered a pollo asado and carne asada taco as well. They must have mixed up my order because I only ended up with 2 al pastor and 2 carne asada tacos. No biggie but a bit disappointing. Thankfully, the carne asada was much better than the al pastor and although it was also cut really thick, it remained tender and juicy. The flavor was great and didn't need any sauce to be enjoyed.
A big part of the problem, aside from the meats, is the proportion of the tacos. One of them only had 1 tortilla and the others had 2 but they were really dry. Toppings wise, there was a huge amount of salsa and very little onions or cilantro. I had asked for pineapple on my al pastor tacos, which they confirmed twice, but ultimately forgot to add. While the sauce is decent and has a good bite, they put on way too much and it overpowers everything else. It's also much hotter then I expected and even though I love hot food, it was too hot for my son and he couldn't even finish eating.
MTB is not a full service restaurant and even though the counter service was great, they were understaffed and overwhelmed. Unfortunately, it showed. They only had one cook working at the time and even though they weren't super busy, it did take quite a while to get our food. And not only did they mess up our order, but several other guests around us had errors in theirs.
Some simple planning and a couple extra hands would most likely make a huge difference in quality here. I do think they have potential and because of that, I'll come back in a month or so when they hopefully got the kinks worked out. But for now, unfortunately my dreams of getting a good taco spot in our neck of the woods have been crushed again!
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)