This is an extremely belated review. By which I mean not that it’s being posted on a Thursday rather than my usual Tuesday for Twin Cities reports (blame my heavily jet lagged condition in Delhi) but that the place I am reporting on is fairly old news at this point. Now, I don’t mean that anyone ever looks to my restaurant reports to discover new places to eat in the Twin Cities. It’s just that the buzz around El Sazon now is not centered on their gas station-based casual food counter in Eagan—which opened in early 2022—but on the higher-end brick and mortar restaurant they opened in South Minneapolis late last year and which has received strong reviews. We’d been planning to eat at the new place ever since we got back from our travels at the end of March but I felt that we needed to first finally get out to the gas station location. Plans to do so fell through several times over the summer before the missus and I finally made it out there towards the end of October for a quick lunch. We liked the food enough to want to go back with the boys—which we finally managed to do the day before Thanksgiving. Here now is a report on both meals.

As I say, at this point very few food-focused people in the Twin Cities need an introduction to El Sazon but here’s the quick version. The gas station counter was opened by Cristian and Karen de Leon in March 2022, both veterans of the restaurant world. It is located literally inside a BP gas station off Diffley Rd. in Eagan. While she is Mexican, he—the chef—is from Guatemala and his own training is in French cuisine. This hybrid background was apparently brought to bear on a series of tasting dinners they held at the gas station in early 2023 but the food at the gas station outlet—and, as far as I can make out, this is true of the menu at El Sazon Cocina & Tragos as well—is decidedly Mexican. Of course, I may just be revealing my ignorance here of the crossovers between Mexican and Guatemalan food. The point is that if you go to the gas station outlet in search of good Mexican food you won’t be disappointed in what you eat. We certainly weren’t.

If you have not been yourself, you may be wondering about the setup. There are a few tables to the left when you enter the gas station market. There’s one long communal table and a few smaller ones. The kitchen is over on the other side of the gas station cashier and you go over there to order and pay at a self-service screen under a large menu. There’s no interaction with any staff during this process. The machine spits out a receipt with an order number on it and when your food is ready someone will bring it out and call out your order number. After you’re done eating you clear your own table.

At our first lunch the missus got their quesabirria. This is an order of three crisp birria and cheese tacos served with a small bowl of consome. She pronounced it to be very good and based on the half taco I tried I could not disagree. I got a trio of tacos of my own. This was more of a mixed bag. The chicken al pastor was ho hum at best. The carnitas was better but nothing revelatory compared to what’s available all over the metro. However, the third, the camaron/shrimp taco, was just excellent. The breaded shrimp were perfectly fried and went down a treat with a lashing of the accompanying salsa. All of this came to just above $36.

At our second meal we branched out a little more, but just a little. The missus and the older boy shared three of the shrimp tacos and a quesadilla with the chicken al pastor. The shrimp tacos were excellent once again. The quesadilla itself was made well but the chicken al pastor was still middling at best. The younger boy asked for two birria tacos and an asada taco. The birria tacos are not the same as the tacos in the quesabirria: instead it’s the pulled birria meat in a regulation corn tortilla with toppings. He liked them a lot. He thought the asada taco was just okay. I meanwhile got an order of their birria ramen, which is basically a bowl of birria with regulation ramen noodles in it. It also comes with a small container of their chilli oil and two taquitos on the side. I liked every aspect of this dish. The total for this meal was just over $77 plus some sodas purchased separately from the gas station counter.

For a look at the setup and everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see what’s coming next from the Twin Cities.

As I said, we’re looking forward to trying their formal restaurant as well. Hopefully that’ll happen in January. Next week, I’ll have a report on another Twin Cities meal, a dinner at 112 Eatery that was eaten even before our first meal at El Sazon. That’ll be next Tuesday. This weekend I will post the last report from California in June, of a dinner of Korean bbq.