Guy N.
Yelp
Mexican Street Food Review #1
Taqueria Sanchez #2 is a great find. This is an expansion unit of the original Sanchez on Slauson, about a minute's drive away. The original has a small market attached which includes a carneceria which we go to sometimes when we barbeque at work. This #2 installment is just the restaurant but has inside seating and a salsa bar unlike the original which is just an outdoor counter and window (true street style).
The inside seating is great on rainy days (few and far between in SoCal) but just convinient altogether to sit and enjoy certain menu items that would be difficult to eat standing up.
The salsa bar includes a few red sauces, a green sauce, and a avocado sauce. Nothing extremely spicy but all the sauces are pretty tasty, which is important to me at least. I like spicy but if it tastes like oil or just ground chili powder (bitter), then it's not worth the heat. Peppers have great flavor if you prepare them correctly and I hate to see mexican joints waste all their time on sauces that don't taste good. This is not the case here. Great taste all around. The bar also includes the standard radishes and carrot/onion sides.
Now to the important part, the main dishes. This place, even though it's an inside sit down type place physically now is actually still very much a street stand type cuisine. Their main menu consists of the standard tacos, burritos, tortas, and cocteles, but due to the plentiful seating, they are also able to serve other things such as quesadillas, nachos, gorditas, tamales, and mojarra.
The tacos, served soft and hard, are decent size. I'm not into huge soft corn tortilla tacos because it's just not quite the same as a small 2-3 bite street taco. These tacos are in between the 2 extremes so it's a good size and not too expensive. Standard onions and cilantro are all that they put on there. The hard tacos, taco dorados, are house made hard tacos made to order. They include the standard lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and crema. Very good texture on the shell and very messy, but good for the texture freaks. (partially guilty)
Burritos are good sized but not too large to require a fork lift to carry around. I'm all into good deals but do not need a 2 lb burrito to deem it a good value. Definitely quality trumps quantity. They also offer your burrito to be doused in red or green sauce and cheese, an advantage of the sit down dining experience.
Tortas are pretty good. They use standard torta pan which is not always the case in a lot of joints around SoCal. The bread is what makes the torta in my opinion. It has to be soft and slightly toasty on the outside. They put crema, lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and your choice of meat. Lengua torta is one of my norms.
Cocteles are good. I have tried their mixta and camarones cocteles as well as their tostadas. Served with standard tapatio, avocado slices, lime, and chips. Their seafood is fresh and perfectly made.
Special mention goes to my other staple here, the Gordita Rajas. A gordita, unlike it's faux Taco Bell cousin, is basically masa that's deep fried as a flat disk and then cut horizontally so that it makes a pocket. pita-esque. Rajas is chile peppers (sweet hot peppers I believe) that are sliced and slow cooked until they are all soft and translucent, texture similar to caramalized onions. They add their mexican hard cheese and grilled onions and what you have is a meatless cheesy spicy gordita. Very good.
Meats: Due to the popularity, they offer a wide variety of meats to choose from for all their standard serving forms. Carne asada, Pollo, Al pastor, Carnitas, Lengua, Cabeza, Chile Verde, Lomo, Camarones, Pescado, Buche, Chicharrones. I usually judge a place on their lengua and cabeza since these take a lot of prep work beforehand in order to make it well. The lengua is pretty good but the cabeza is a bit too sloppy for my tastes. It's tasty but way too much juice which makes it very messy. The lengua is well made, cooked long enough to be soft but not too long so that the structure is still there. Basically, I want to recognize what I'm eating in this case. The lomo is not a regular item in most taquerias so I like to get this sometimes. It's the loin of the cow and is very tasty. It's like the taste of carne asada but softer and a lot tastier.
They offer a lot of different drinks to quench the heat. They have the standard street stand staples such as Jarritos soda and Agua Frescas (Jamaica, Melon, Horchata).
All in all, I would deem this place a sit down street stand restaurant. It has the taste of a lot of good street style mexican food but has the advantage to serve family style food as well. This place is packed most of the time and the line winds it's way throughout the seating area. Great place for lunch.