Cocina Latina Review (Charlotte, NC 28205) »
The East Side of Charlotte has seen a decline over the last few years, and a number of places have stayed empty. One of those that hasn't is a small restaurant that was vacated by an Italian restaurant (that was quite good). It was replaced by a Mexican restaurant, and recently we decided to check it out to see if the replacement was as good as the original. Of course we couldn't compare the two, being two completely different types of food, but you know what I mean.
On the inside of the place, little has actually changed. This doesn't really mean anything, other than the new occupants have decided to focus on their food rather than the decoration. This is a good sign to me, while others may take it how they like. As you walk in you are greeted by a friendly hostess, and you get to see someone making up some homemade pupusas on the grill, Yum!
One nice touch is that this appears to be an authentic Mexican restaurant (we were the only non-Latino people there at the time), yet they actually had a menu that had English descriptions that were decent, and they also had employees that spoke English. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that they should be required to do so. I'm just saying that it was nice. There are places in Charlotte - in fact places not far from this one - that have good food, but it's tough to get something decent because we don't speak Spanish.
After sitting down, we looked over the menu and munched on some very tasty chips. The salsa wasn't really to my liking, but that's just my personal taste. I don't care for a lot of cilantro. I know that some people do.
The menu itself was different from what we're used to as Americanized Mexican food eaters, and that's a good thing. Rather than your typical Speedy Gonzales combination, I went with a simple pork burrito that came with rice and beans. Both the rice and beans were smaller portions than we are used to, but the burrito was huge! I ate perhaps half of it and took the rest home. But the quality was phenomenal! Meanwhile, my wife had some sort of dish (I didn't notice what it was) that involved cheese, chicken and beans on top of those pupusa-looking things. It was also quite tasty, and we took some of that home too.
I think it is safe to we will be back - the price was cheap the food was good and we had plenty of it. The only downside was that the service wasn't that great. It was friendly, it just didn't come back too often. This may be because we needed the English-speaking waitress, as it seemed the other tables had more regular service. We may take another trip to find out.
