How often do we in St. Louis get to try a food item just as it is being featured in the current issue of Gourmet magazine? Well, maybe you can recall an opportunity, but we can’t.
We even ate the torta ahogada before the magazine was opened at our house.
It all began when we had dinner at Los Tarascos, just south of the airport on Woodson Road. The large dining room is full of brightly painted and carved chairs that made us think we’d wandered into a fiesta. The menu is equally large, and we barely scratched the surface in several visits that brought delicious, imaginative, unusual-to-St. Louis dishes at modest prices.
Chips arrive warm and crisp; the salsa is chunky, full of cilantro and the occasional bit of white onion, quite spicy, extremely fresh and with that made-in-our-kitchen attitude. Guacamole seemed to have been made to order, arriving at room temperature, happily chunky, and very mild, easy enough for the heat-phobic to enjoy.
But understand, this is a far cry from the drive-through sort of Mexican food. There are twelve different fillings for tacos. Quesadillas? Another dozen, including three vegetarian options. For those who seek the authentic, this is it. The barbacoa meat is lamb, sliced and tender. Tacos arrive open-faced, two small corn tortillas piggybacked with meat, chopped onion, a sprinkling 
of cilantro and wedges of lime. We tried lengua, or tongue, the barbacoa, pork al pastor, or marinated and roasted, and the chicharrones in green sauce, which is described as pork crackling. It certainly is pork rind, which is the base of cracklings, but Los Tarascos simmers it past crisp to chewy tenderness. It makes a tasty filling, since there’s plenty of fat under the rind, and we all know how delicious pork fat can be, but be warned. The green sauce carried more heat to the chicharrones than the other fillings we tried. The delicious chunks of pork also are available on sopes, the fat patties of cornmeal dough that act as a base. If you like polenta, you’ll enjoy sopes.
Tostadas with ceviche are listed as a first course, but the serving was so large that it could easily have served as a summertime entree, and really is more of a dish to be eaten with forks than fingers holding breakable chips. Fish, shrimp, tomato and peppers, all chopped and dressed with lime juice, standard ceviche ingredients, are stretched with the addition of chopped iceberg lettuce, which gave a nice crunch. A few slices of creamy ripe avocado provided a handsome contrast to both the eye and the mouth.
Enchiladas in mole sauce were filled with shredded white meat of chicken. Like many of the other meats, it displayed a slight sweetness, enhanced and complemented by the mole sauce, which has its own sweetness. Rice and beans are present, of course, the rice not overcooked and the beans above average.
Our Gourmet encounter came from a torta ahogada, a sandwich that the menu says is a traditional recipe from Guadalajara. As it turned out, so does the magazine. Slices of roasted pork leg are layered in a hamburger bun with a slather of refried beans. The top of the bun is dipped in an arbol chile sauce, the sandwich is cut in six pieces (because it really is a fork food, too) and a little more sauce is ladled over the top. The menu describes the sauce as "really hot;" we’d call it medium. We’d also call the whole thing an absolute delight. The French fries that come alongside mopped up the last of the sauce. Very tasty, indeed.
Menudo, the tripe soup-stew, is offered in two versions, traditional and Chihuahua, which comes with beef and hominy. Our bowl of the latter included chopped onion and cilantro, plus lime for squeezing. (We usually add all the onion, one good shot of whatever citrus is served, and a generous pinch of cilantro.) This was menudo as soup, the only solids being pieces of tripe. The broth was superb, rich and bracing, with great seasoning; Joe, formerly tripe-reluctant, gave it high praise on all counts. Ann, the tripe lover, got a double-take from the owner, who’d not taken the order but arrived to serve it and realized it was for the female diner. It’s an excellent version; we’ll try the beef/hominy one next time.
We also had a quesadilla with the cochinita pibil, pork described as sweet and sour. Sweet and tangy, only mildly hot, it worked well.
We never managed to visit Los Tarascos on a night when they had tres leches cake in the kitchen. Our best dessert was the flan (shown below), dense, of course, as is the tradition in the Hispanic kitchen, but very creamy and relatively un-sweet. It trumped the sopapilla, which was chewy rather than puffy and crisp.
We’d encourage beer rather than margaritas here; servings are large, but they taste more like lime lollipops than real fruit. Service is eager, if slightly disorganized, but the food is good enough that servers should be allowed plenty of latitude.
Los Tarascos
4444 Woodson Rd., Woodson Terrace
314-890-8668
Lunch and Dinner daily
Credit cards: All major
Wheelchair access: Fair
Smoking: Yes
Entrees: $6-$15
Comments
6 responses
I love Los Tarascos! Their verde sauce is great, but it’s certainly potent heat-wise. Fantastic mole, and I must recommend their parrillada, sort of a mixed grill with corn cob thirds, beef, pork, shrimp, chorizo, chicharrones – it’s good.
Great restaurant. Maybe the best Mexican in ST. Louis area. Very broad menu—including Conchinita Pibil is a regional Yucatan dish–plus traditional dishes like Tacos al Pastor and Menudo. Portions are moe than ample. I recommend it to everyone.
The decor is the best of any Mexican restaurant I’ve ever been too, and those number in the hundreds. The food is good, not great. They don’t have a single salsa that is up to the standards of Pueblo Solis or My Family (on the Rock Road in St. Ann) or Lily’s, but the service is friendly. My wife enjoyed the pumpkin flower quesadilla.
All I ask is to offer a simple arbol tomatillo salsa, without any of the cilantro that is somewhat overdone in their green tomatillo salsa. Oh, and Joe’s right about the margs, but that’s true most places if you don’t go top shelf. Heck, the Kool-Aid type margs at Hacienda (in Rock Hill) win readers’ choice awards. I’d say the best choice is a big ol’ glass of St. Louis tap water and a bottle of Negra Modelo, maybe two.
I love Los tarascos!!
Their food is great!!
The place is really comfortable too and the decor its pretty authentic and cool.
Last night I ate there they gave me their new website. Check them out.
http://lostarascosmexicanfood.com/
I grew up on the flavors of Mexico. I moved to STL three years ago and have the good fortune to work a couple of blocks from Los Tarasco’s. This is NOT TexMex/American food.
This is the best, most authentic Mexican food you’ll find this side of central Mexico. Try the different regional dishes, the Tinga is fantastic, Barbracoa is served on weekends and worth a 60 mile round trip to eat!
This is a laidback atmosphear, don’t be in a hurry. I eat here at least twice a week for the last couple of years. Ask for “pickles”, the one with carrots, it’s a delight!
They should change their name to Los Tarascos Mexican Restaurant. They changed their menu–I still have a copy of their old to go menu–and they no longer really resemble a taqueria. A few years earlier, another fantastic taqueria called My Family similarly gringoized their place. The food is still decent, and the salsas are great. The decor at Los Tarascos is AA+, maybe the cutest restaurant I’ve ever seen, but for real taqueria food in that neck o’ the woods, try the little hole-in-the-wall a little west on the Rock Road called Taqueria El Jalapeno.