This week my fiance and I decided to try a restaurant neither one of us had been to in the South Side. Personally, I liked the food at Emiliano’s, while my Colombian-born finance was mad that I took him to yet another restaurant that serves Mexican food.
I ordered the Pollo Mexicano lunch, which came with spicy chicken, rice, beans, tortillas and a small “side salad” which was just a mixture of things to put on top of a taco for $11.99. The other dish we ordered was called Tacos de Birria. It came with three tacos, rice, a slice of lime, a cup of what we thought was meat grease and three condiment cups of salsa, onions and cilantro.
The restaurant had free chips and salsa which I used to gauge how spicy the food might be. Usually the spiciness of the overall cuisine depends on how spicy the salsa is, which wasn’t spicy at all.
When ordering the Pollo Mexicano, the medium spicy label on the menu scared me into thinking that it was going to be too hot, but when it came out it tasted completely mild with just a small kick that left a stinging aftertaste in the mouth. The chicken had a spicy, smokey and delicious flavor, but because it was the lunch portion it came with a sad looking amount of chicken for the price.
My fiance is weird and did not like the rice, but he still praised the fact it came with carrots, corn and green beans mixed in. According to him, this is how rice should be made. He was right, it tasted like most Mexican rice, but the vegetables added extra flavor and were the elements that my tongue searched the most for while eating.
The Tortillas that came with the dish were wrapped so tightly that they stuck together and were comically sticky to pull apart. The refried-beans that my dish came with had a decent amount of cheese that dominated the overall flavor; it was good.
When I mixed all of the dish’s components into a tortilla, the little tacos I made all had the chicken’s medium spicy kick, and adding the vegetables from my “side salad” was something that I genuinely enjoyed. On the other hand, my fiance was having a terrible experience. While I liked the meat from the Tacos de Birria, he was not enjoying it at all. The meat was fatty, juicy and tender. We did not end up dipping our tacos into the bowl of the grease they came with.
As for our waiter? He was not good at all and at times looked like he was ignoring our table altogether. Especially when he only had two tables to take care of and at times stopped at his other one to have a lengthy conversation. It took so long just to ask for a dessert menu, and our drink cups were left empty for a lengthy period of time before he noticed to refill them.
We then ordered dessert. To my Colombian fiance’s disappointment, the tres leches cake was not up to par. It had the structure and texture of a rice crispy treat and cost around six dollars. The cake was wet, but not soaking wet like the tres leches cakes I know my fiance is accustomed to. The cake was sweet and the whipped cream topping with cinnamon was delicious, especially with the white la lechera drizzle on top.
Overall I think that Emiliano’s does a good job with their own take on Mexican cuisine. However, the service truly was terrible and we wasted a lot of time sitting at the restaurant for ages just waiting for our server to remember that we were there. It’s probably best to stick to a Mexican restaurant Downtown before going out of your way to come to Emiliano’s in the South Side.
