14 S. Elm StreetI don’t eat out in Zeeland very often. Even when I worked in Grand Rapids, I’d find myself in the area quite a bit but Zeeland’s downtown is just far enough of the I-196 BL that I never really went looking for food.
A colleague and I were in Zeeland last week on an assignment. It wasn’t going to take long but we had to make the trip from our Kalamazoo office because there was no one available in the Grand Rapids office. Little road trips are fun every now and then.
We did what we needed to do and were finished around lunch time. We ran in to a former colleague and she pointed us towards Frank’s for lunch. I looked it up and it appeared to be a sit down service restaurant which we really didn’t have time for.
I always have some place to eat when I travel somewhere and this trip was no different. I found a taco place which I assumed would be pretty quick and not far from where we were at.
StrEATs Taco Kitchen (their stylizing, not mine) is on Elm Street just south of East Main in downtown Zeeland. The restaurant is owned by the property management company that owns the building. According to a Holland Sentinel article, they knew the property would make a good restaurant location and since no one else was interested, they opened it themselves. Just using Goggle street view, it appears the building has been empty for a while.
The restaurant opened last June which was kind of a surprise to me because every single person who ordered in front of us started with “it’s my first time here.” The restaurant is counter service and the menu can be a bit overwhelming. These are not Mexican tacos. They refer to what they do as “Global Street Food.”
It took quite a while to get to the front of the line because literally everyone was asking tons of questions. I’ve never been that person. I know what I like. I look on the menu, I see what I like and I order it.
The tacos are all priced individually and while one taco may be a meal for some people, I am not some people. I took advantage of their 2 Taco Combo which comes with chips and a drink.
As you can see, these are not your average tacos.
My first selection was the Breakfast Taco. This taco is kind of what it sounds like. It’s scrambled eggs, bacon, StrEATs Tots, Pico, and a spicy Maple aioli in a corn tortilla. I don’t always love tots…or aioli…but that wasn’t even a concern with this taco. Like all of their tacos, it’s flavor and texture overload. I got a lot of potato from the tots and a lot of soft, delicious scrambled egg. The bacon was pretty crispy and you can’t have breakfast without bacon, right? I pushed a lot of the pico off because, there was a lot of pico.
My second taco choice was also a pork selection. I picked the BBQ Pork Mac & Cheese. This taco is a flour tortilla stuffed with a Homemade “Southern Style” Mac & Cheese, smoky pulled pork, and a Sweet and Spicy BBQ sauce. Mac & Cheese and pulled pork is such a good combo and works exactly like you think it would in taco form.
The chips are made to order corn tortilla chips. They came with a small cup of pico. I used the pico for some of them but they were actually pretty good on their own. My co-worker thinks I’m weird for eating tortilla chips without anything to dip them in but a good chip is a good chip.
I typically choose to eat on the road when we’re outside of Kalamazoo but that wasn’t going to be possible with tacos. We actually sat down and ate a meal.
The dining isn’t really big and it was pretty full when we stopped in for lunch. There is a mixture of high pub tables, basic four tops, some bench seating and even some window counter seating. The decor is really bright. They take advantage of some large windows facing the street to let in a lot of light in addition to some fluorescents running along the edge of the dining space.
The cost of my two tacos and chips was a little over $13. I always pause when I see prices for tacos over $3.50 a piece but in this case, you get a lot of food in each one of the small taco sized tortillas.
StrEATs Taco Kitchen was a good find for us. Lunch took a little longer than I had hoped it would when we walked in but it wasn’t too bad. We still got back to Kalamazoo with plenty of time to spare.
I like this concept. They bring you in with the lure of tacos but these are not simple ordinary tacos. There’s so much to choose so even the pickiest of eaters can find something amazingly delicious.