My wife and I decided to give Tijuana Flats a try and it fell flat.
Nothing special here and certainly nothing authentic other than a myriad of hot sauces. A warehouse feel with open ceiling, hard cement floor and hard walls that resonate any conversations or noise emanating from the place. We could not talk across the table with each other mostly because of a table of four in the booth behind us.
Menu is the standard array of tacos, burritos, chimichangas, quesadillas. Also beer and a couple of desserts. Not much going on here.
Met by a greeter who shared her favorites. I wish restaurants would simply stop this practice. It is cheesy and sometimes their favorites are simply the most expensive items on their menu. Not so at Tijuana Flats, but her favorites were the jalapeno poppers (trite and found everywhere) and the quesadillas (no big deal). Wow! VERY impressive.
We entered this cave-line atmosphere just after 11:30AM, so it was pre-lunch crowd, a crowd which never materialized. Another clue as to how popular this place is. But even with a less than full capacity crowd, it took about 20 minutes for the kitchen to get our meal out. So...not a place to go if you have to grab a quick bite.
There was an electronic special board flashing a couple of specials, one of which I ordered, the two double shelled tacos, exterior shell soft tortilla, interior crispy corn. They were good and filling as they had cheese spread, meat, lettuce, tomato and cheese in them. I had one steak and the other ground beef. The ground beef was the best, lots of flavor. The steak was so-so at best. Very little flavor and for a dollar more, not worth it. The ground beef was better than Taco Bell.
Wife's quesadilla was what you would expect. How can you screw a quesadilla up?
I asked if Tijuana Flats was a California creation, because of the name and because they have, and push, whole wheat tortillas. If you have not done whole wheat style of tortillas or breads, think about skipping them both. In order for whole wheat to be somewhat edible it is loaded with sugar. And even then it has the flavor or cardboard.
I once had a dinner cooked by a friend that was whole wheat tortillas stuffed with mashed sweet potatoes and baked...which was not only hard to eat, but was certainly horrible.
If you want to make your Tijuana Flats experience an even more miserable and blah experience, go for the whole wheat. Yucky for sure.
We won't be back, but some people will find it OK, so gave ti two stars as we have seen better.