I am traveling tomorrow to San Antonio, so Mr. Clay and I decided to do our on-going search for perfect lunch spots today instead of our usual Friday repast. Unfortunately, I am only in San Antonio for the day, and won't get to try any of the wonderful restaurants there. The office I am training is providing lunch. Perhaps I can give you a review tomorrow night of a box lunch sandwich (a staple of the training world) or a couple of slices of delivery pizza.
It was Mr. Clay's week to pick, and decided on La Hacienda, a little Tex-Mex place that has been around for years. He ate there once many years ago, and I had never been. The lunch menu offered a pretty wide variety, and the regular menu had plenty of options. The prices appeared comparable to our first outing, Miguelito's. The place was a little bigger than I expected from the outside. The place was decorated in a pretty generic decor, but it was clean and inoffensive.
Chips and salsa were brought out right away. The salsa was decent, but not memorable. It was soupy, which I generally prefer to a chunkier sauce, and the flavor was good. I wouldn't banish it from the table, but I wouldn't pay for it either. Miguelito's was far superior, and they left a pitcher on the table for refills. La H's chips were superior; they had a lot of flavor, were a little thinner, and were very crisp. I was a fan.
I ordered the number 4 from the lunch menu. It included a soft cheese taco, a traditional Tex-Mex crispy beef taco, rice, and beans. Mr. Clay ordered an enchilada/taco/rice/beans platter and a small bowl of queso for us to sample. I have to say the queso was a huge disappointment. It was obviously a doctored up canned sauce. It did have a nice, light cumin flavor but had almost no cheese flavor and some sort of artificial thickening agent added to it. It was half the cost of M's and was less than half as good. Very disappointing.
Lunch arrived promptly and I was pleasantly surprised. My cheese taco was fantastic. The tortilla was fresh and had great corn flavor. There was plenty of melted cheese inside, but not so much that it had the ooze factor when cutting into it. It was covered with the artist-formerly-known-as-La Hacienda's-chile con queso, but somehow it worked. Likely, it was due to all the fresh cheese inside the taco that bulked up the cheese flavor and made the other unpleasant aspects more less offensive. It was a winner.
The crispy beef taco brought its A-game. The shell was crisp and not at all stale. The beef was well seasoned, had enough grease and was delicious. They also put plenty of lettuce, tomato, and shredded cheddar on the side. It was the Robin to the cheese taco's Batman.
The rice was good, though a bit under seasoned. I also thought it was a bit to fluffy for Mexican rice. Still, it was a solid contributor to the team that is #4 on the lunch menu. The beans were great. They were not too soupy nor to solid, and they were well seasoned. They had great flavor (they may have actually used lard in making them, though I would be surprised), and we both agreed on their merits. When the check came, I had eaten plenty to last me for the rest of the day and the cost was actually lower than the menu price...and it was not a mistake by the waitress!
The only issue I had with the atmosphere was that the music was some sort of adult contemporary schlock that was being played a little too loud. Oh, that and the fact it was crap music. When we pulled back into the office parking lot, we realized that we drove there, ordered, ate, and drove back in 45 minutes. We will definitely return to LH in the future, but we won't order the chile con queso. I tried not to compare LH to M but can't help it. Here is the breakdown:
Service: LH
Atmosphere: M
Chips: LH
Salsa: M
Queso: big edge to M
Entree: slight edge to LH
Cost: slight edge to LH
Proximity to work: even
Later I will post on the most entertaining-looking human I've seen in some time. Sorry for no pics, but Mr. Clay forgot his phone, and I didn't think about it until I was finished.
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