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| - Bringing tacos to Riverside, at first the east end location of the hip La Carnita is hard to spot with its intentionally nondescript storefront. But since they opened a Sweet Jesus outlet at the front, suddenly it is much easier to find it. How can anyone miss a place where a modest crowd has gathered for ice cream and leaves a obnoxious sticky mess throughout in their wake?
Dingy dark inside like how so many other hipster places like it like that, I was surprised at how deep the "hole-in-the-wall" square footage is (I don't recall the Rasputin bar it replaced being that big). Stopping a few notches short of turning the 'hood I grew up in into another Ossington Avenue scene (no thanks), the music here is bloody ghetto-blasting loud! I have to ponder if the child sitting a couple tables down from me (hey, this is Queen East, not Queen West) has gone nearly deaf after this ordeal.
Other reviews here have portrayed the service as up and down and even snobby; I was generally satisfied with the responsive service I got. The only qualm was that it took an unusually long time to bring our Sweet Jesus branded paleta dessert bars to us (go for Key Lime Pie). It's not like they made that stuff to order.
The tacos, we tried a bunch. None was spicy as I would have liked it. The cod was definitely the best of the bunch with the nice soft sexy fish meat playing well with the rest of the ingredients. At around $5-6 each, you shouldn't go crazy with the order. Unless, I suppose, that's what you want to do. They arrive surprisingly quite quickly to you, much faster than Kensington Market's Seven Lives could ever pull off.
As for the off-putting olfactory qualities of the restaurant that some have reported, what smell? Maybe they fixed whatever it was long before I got around to trying this location out.
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