10846 S. Cicero AvenueI’ve always told J, as much as I want to live in Chicago, it’s probably a good thing we don’t. I’ve eaten horribly these past few days. Lots of Italian beef. Lots of pizza. Lots of fried food. It’s just all so dang good.
Sunday we had a pretty late lunch. We did our shopping at Chicago Ridge Mall then hit the drive thru at Buona Beef for lunch at 3:00. I thought maybe that would get me through the day but after everyone went to bed, I started getting really hungry. I knew there were options around me…it was just a matter of if I wanted pizza or tacos.
I chose tacos and headed toward Jalisco Express Restaurant on the corner of Cicero Avenue and 109th Street in Oak Lawn. Jalisco has a couple of full service restaurants in the area, but they also have this little quick, counter service place in the Oak Plaza shopping center.
It was about 10:30 or so when I stopped in to pick up something to eat. We pass this place all the time late at night and I always think, “I’m gonna go there after everyone goes to bed.” This time, I finally did.
The restaurant is pretty small. There is an order counter just as you walk in the door and the large menu is printed above it. The menu takes up almost all of the horizontal space in the shop. Below it is a window into the small kitchen where the Mexican classics are turned out.
The floors are done in a mosaic tile to give the restaurant a little better feel than most strip mall take out places. There are about a half a dozen places tables squeezed in to the small dining room so you can sit and eat if that’s what you choose to do.
I put in an order for four asada tacos and some chips and salsa. The cost came out to about $14 and it was in my hand and out the door in a little over five minutes.
When I got back to my in-laws, I grabbed a bunch of napkins and a bottle of water then dug in to the tightly wrapped foil packets containing the tacos.
The tacos were a cross between a Mexican taco and an American taco. The heavily seasoned steak was piled on to two grilled corn tortilla shells. They are topped with lettuce and tomato instead of cilantro and onion. I also grabbed a couple things of hot sauce to give them a little more kick. The steak on these tacos was so good and there was quite a bit of it. I really could have just got rid of everything else and ate the steak with a fork. It had some nice charring from the grill around the edges and quite a bit of flavor. The lettuce is a weird choice that my mind had a hard time with. It was green and my brain was expecting cilantro but that’s not what was there. It was still tasty but these tacos would have been something else with cilantro.
The chips were pretty standard authentic Mexican restaurant chips. They seemed to be locally fried from corn tortillas. They had a slight dusting of salt but nothing overpowering. These chips really needed to be paired with something and they were perfect for the salsa.
The salsa was a very thin, very fresh concoction. The didn’t really stick to the chips on it’s own. It was the kind of salsa that you really need to scoop up. The water from the veggies makes it a really thin sauce, but it really does taste like these veggies were still in the ground just a few hours prior to the consumption.
Jalisco Express Restaurant really nailed the late night craving for me. I love a good taco and I got a good taco from this place. I would have liked it even more had they used cilantro instead of lettuce, but the meat carried this taco on it’s own.