by Chad Henson

The Saint
1416 E. Olive Way
Happy Hour 5-7 on Weekdays
Weekend Brunch

Some brohams and I checked out The Saint before the huge Bobcats game tonight. (Go Bobcats!) I was surprised to only find about 5 entrees on the menu (Enchiladas, Tacos, Mole Chicken, Pork served on a banana leaf, and Carne Asada), but the 80 tequilas more than made up for this. And we unexpectedly arrived during happy hour. From 5-7 pm all food is half off. What?! I said, all food is HALF OFF from 5-7! This includes full entrees.

We started by attempting to ordering $2 Tecates (my Guam fake ID was denied) and chips and salsa ($2.75 happy hour price) from our bro-tastic waiter. Warm chips served with fresh guac, smokey red salsa, salsa verde, and a tight pico de gallo. If you’re having any trouble visualizing this in your head, please see the picture below.

I ordered the chicken enchiladas which are normally $10 but the happy hour price was $5. Shiiiit, I can’t even get a Zesty Chicken Border Bowl at Taco Bell for this price after a Bobcats game. The chicken looked to be simmered in an oniony green sauce and wrapped in corn tortillas. The tortillas are then covered with a mild mole sauce, pleasant white cheese (maybe cojita?), more onions, tomatoes and cilantro. Incredible. Especially for someone who isn’t typically enamoured by the mole. (Except for this one time at a Bobcats game, we freestyled a giant gatorade container full of mole sauce instead of gatorade and dumped it over the coach’s head after we beat the Indians 88-65. That was fuckin’ awesome. BobCATS!!!)

$5!

So there is no question that I will be back to try the other 4 menu items. Usually after Bobcats games we order 30 Pizza Hut P’Zones, but I’m gonna try to talk the team into The Saint next time.

Seattle Taco Taco Rating: 85%

1427 N 45 Street
Seattle, WA 98103

Sometimes when I haven’t had a taco for 18 hours I get the shakes. So today, I curbed my trembling bod at The Chile Pepper. The CP (not to be confused with cerebral palsy) is a quaint little house located in Wallingford. We ordered spicy pork tacos and the chicken suiza enchiladas. All this food arrived about 3 seconds after placing the order. I’ve waited longer for food at Long John Silver’s so this was mildly alarming.

Aesthetically, the enchiladas and tacos appear vibrant and substantial. However, both the chicken and pork were dry and lacked stroke-inducingly awesome flavor. A la carte items are not listed on the menu forcing customers to pay $9.95 – $15.95 for a crazy-looking bean and fluorescent white rice accompaniment. (Uncle Ben called. He wants his rice back.) And for some reason there are peas in the rice.

Perhaps the CP was having an off day, but maybe we will never know.

Seattle Taco Rating: 61%

401 Broadway East
Happy Hour 3-6
$3 Bottles
$2.50 Wells
$5 Margs

The party-like atmosphere at La Puerta immediately makes you think you’re in for a good time. There’s a full bar area, giant deck, fiesta decor and sometimes gangsta Mexican rap on the stereo. Today I even heard a tricked-out salsa dance remix of Coldplay’s “Clocks” with horns and congas and shit. Totally put me in the mood.

But the mood soon changed. I’ve had no less than 30 tacos this week, so I ordered sopitos ($6.95 includes 2 sopitos and rice and beans). La Puerta’s Sopitos turned out to be a weird pile of beans, meat, tomatoes, parmesan cheese, and about 12 bushels of iceberg lettuce suffocating a thick, dense corn tortilla. The produce looked fresh, but there was something strangely rich about the dish that made me uneasy since I was basically eating a jacked up taco salad.

Somebody tell me what is going on here

Gastroenterologically, La Puerta doesn’t do a body good. I had a very long walk after lunch and this made me nervous if you know what I mean. It was a close one.

The following food tourney was made possible by Safeway and Clarence Birdseye, who developed the quick-freezing process of food preservation in the early 20th century.

Contestants:
Banquet, Beef Enchilada and Tamale Combo Meal
Discover Cuisine, Chipotle Chicken with Mexican Style Rice
Stouffer’s, Steak Fajita Flatbread
Hungry-Man, Chicken Burrito

Last Place – Banquet (8%)

Though priced right (one dollar), Banquet really drops the ball on their Beef and Tamale combo. In fact, they maybe never had the ball in the first place. Inside of the seedy black plastic tray is a bunch of slimy, nauseating stuff that nobody really has any business eating. The tamale and enchilada were, literally, impossible to discern; they both could have been sculpted from day-old barf. The beans, colored of dead and battered flesh, slip between fork prongs before you get anywhere near your mouth.

If you are going to a grocery store and buying this kind of thing intentionally to eat for dinner, then you have abysmal taste in food. If you are buying a bunch of ‘em for your family, then God help you. Eating sculpted barf sucks at any price point.

Third Place – Hungry-Man (12%)

Engineered for the microwave dinner eaters that weren’t quite fulfilled by the regular “sissy” microwave dinners, Hungry-Man promises to, at the very least, fill you up. Which is exactly what their Chicken Burrito dinner – weighing in a 1lb – is supposed to do. But immediately upon peeling the plastic off the tray, it becomes strikingly apparent that this full pound of food is not going inside of anybody. There is a strange tangy sweet scent that emanates from the small cup of Cocada Pudding that is not dissimilar to the small of 7-11 nachos. The beans, once again, are more of a foreshadowing to what the next bathroom visit probably has in store. And the burrito, stringy mushy, cuts like a dull plastic knife through the wretched odor of Pudd’nhead Cocada.

Second Place – Discover Cuisine (45%)

After recovering from my initial shock (this line of food, surprisingly, shares no relation to the cabel channel of the same name) Discover Cuisine’s Chicken and Rice dinner delivered a palatable, confusing meal. Sporting perhaps the most misleading pictures on the box (favorite touch: the cute piece of cilantro placed on the seemingly barbecued chunks of chicken), the dinner amounted to basically a passable pile of rice topped with chicken and soaked in tangy barbecue sauce. Now the box promised a jalapeño sauce, but ten bucks says they just used the same vats of bubbling red liquid that they pump into their other non-Mexican dishes. A bit offsetting, but not a deal-breaker by any means. The meal is sold finally on the crispy heartiness of the black beans in the rice.

First Place – Stouffer’s (55%)

This steak fajita flatbread, coming from Stouffer’s “Corner Bistro” line of foods, and tasting exactly like microwavable pizza, was a Frankenstein creation of tasty proportions. This is the kind of multi-genre zappable appetizer that you can really hang your hat on. Four square pieces of spongy cheese covered bread, sprinkled with pea-sized bits of pepper and steak, the dish contained a strange confidence that the other three competing meals lacked. It was alright being Goldfish-colored Mexican-flavored pizza and I was okay with that too.

Jalisco is the closest Mexican restaurant to my apartment and some kind of Washington chain. The food is consistently mediocre, but I’m not going for the tacos. I’m going to make an offer on the stunning picture (above) that hangs majestically in the dining room. I’ve tried cash, prostitution, my unborn children, a nice combo of all three, but nothing works. Anyway, I still have to order food to increase my chances.

This evening’s visit started with a bizarre chips and salsa delivery. Chips were placed on the table, snatched away and relocated to a table behind me, and then resurfaced later. I have no idea if they were the same ones. It was weird. And both sets of chips were tough and chewy in a stale or over-fried way. I had to really gnaw on these guys and quickly lost interest.

Maybe stale chips work out for Tortilla Soup ($3.75 for a good-sized small). I was impressed with the smoky chipotle soup flavor combined with jack cheese, nice looking chicken parts, Mexican spices, celery, onions, and tortilla strips that never lost their crunch. I would order this again and again.

Things took another turn for the weird when my fish taco ($3.95) arrived. The corn tortilla had a slimy/soggy feel. Also, it was filled with assloads of cilantro so I couldn’t really taste anything else.

Assloads of Cilantro

I noticed that above my table hung a certificate-type of award that said, “Best Mexican Restaurant (non-franchise) by Evening Magazine 1997.” Well, I don’t know about that, but next time I will bring them a new award that says, “Best Artwork I’ve Ever Seen In My Whole Damn Life.”

El Gallito is located in Seattle’s Central District. Sadly, the sweet club down the block, Club Chocolate City, closed down about a year or two ago. Normally you could go for some Mexican, dance to some funky ghetto beats, and maybe get your face blown off. RIP Club Chocolate City. The area is currently safer these days due to gentrification but that’s a whole different plague.

Perhaps one of the greatest things about El Gallito is the salsa. This is the salsa dreams are made of. And it comes in a giant tub so you can go fairly nuts with it. Think really spicy with chunks of onion, green onion and cilantro. Amazing.

Today I ordered a couple of steak tacos ($3.00 each a la carte) and one chile relleno ($4.00 a la carte). El Gallito makes their own homemade taco shells (both hard and soft shell) that pretty much give Diane’s or Old El Paso the finger. Tacos come with really fresh lettuce, tomatoes, onions and cheese combined with the meat (or just beans) of your choice. Check this shit out:

The relleno didn’t have me at hello until I shed about a half centimeter of breading from the perimeter. Only then was I able to enjoy a fresh anaheim pepper stuffed with Monterrey Jack cheese and a slightly mole red sauce.

An abundant pile of sopaipillas ended the night. However, they did not compare to Casa Bonita’s (the world’s most exciting restaurant in Denver) sopaipillas where they are served piping hot but now that I think about it, the food at Casa Bonita is so horrifying that maybe the cliff divers and the sopaipillas seem amazing in comparison. It’s hard to say.

Considering our tab at El Gallito’s was $31.18 and $18.75 was margaritas and $2.68 was tax, this is a great deal for far above average (Seattle) Mexican food and the best salsa ever.

Every Memorial Day since 1987, I have celebrated by going on a giant taco truck frenzy. Here is this year’s taco truck trifecta:

Tacos El Asadero (pictured above)
3517 Rainier Ave. S
Hours: 10am to 10pm

The tacos at Tacos El Asadero are nothing to have a brain aneurysm over. I ordered a spicy pork taco and a beef tongue taco ($1.20 each). The pork was dryish and slightly bland. Even copious amounts of house salsa couldn’t raise the spice factor. And as much as I try, I’m just not that into eating tongue. This feeling exactly parallels the book, He’s Just Not That Into You. Check out the giant chunk of tongue on the left below:

So huge. While the tacos here are not mind-blowing, the atmosphere is attractive. The bus has indoor seating surrounded by a covered outdoor area in a giant and otherwise abandoned lot with ample parking.
Seattle Taco taco rating: 62%

Taqueria Los Potrillos
6230 Rainier Ave. S
Hours: Open until 10:00pm

Los Potrillos is far into one of the shadier areas of town, but it’s totally worth it. On the way, a man at a bus stop shouted that I could “suck it” for 50 bone thugs. I thought to myself, Cool offer, but where I’m going the tacos are only $1.10 bone thugs. Maybe I’ll find him if I ever want to go to Galleria’s or El Camino. My steak taco had large, juicy chunks of steak, cilantro, onions and a beyond pleasant medium spice that really made things happen.
Seattle Taco taco rating: 90%

Taqueria la Pasadita
2143 N. Northgate Way

As I am reminded every Memorial Day, eating dozens of tacos is laborious and sketchy on the bod so la Pasadita would be the last stop this year. While chomping on an asada taco ($1.20 each), I figured that it was a really good sign this taco still tasted great after eating tacos all day long. The grilled mini corn tortillas, thick sauce and medium-hot spice make this taco stand out.
Seattle Taco taco rating: 83%

Clockwise left to right – asada, spicy pork, spicy pork