La Huasteca opened sometime in 2014. It first flashed on my radar in the early part of the summer of 2015 as a birria (a lamb stew) and barbacoa de chivo (slow cooked goat) specialist. I put it on my list but then we went off to L.A and I forgot about it. Thanks to reports on Chowhound it came back on my radar and recently I pulled some friends together so we could go out and sample a goodly portion of the menu. And we did. And man, was it good! I’m tempted to say that it’s the best Mexican food I’ve had in Minnesota, but I need to renew my acquaintance with a number of the other local luminaries. For what it’s worth, it blew our recent meals at Maya Cuisine out of the water. Not just because they have things on the menu here far beyond what’s on offer at Maya, but because even the things that are similar are better here, and the preparation on everything was top-notch. If you haven’t been you should go. And you should go this week. Do it.  Continue reading →

When I redid my restaurant/meal review listings as separate pages I noted in the “introduction” to the Minnesota page that the Twin Cities and environs have a surprisingly robust Mexican food scene and that I should really review more of it. Accordingly, here is a review of Maya Cuisine in Northeast Minneapolis, in the long “ethnic” corridor of Central Avenue. It opened just over three years ago and has since received quite a bit of acclaim in the mainstream Twin Cities food world. Another way of saying this might be to note that in all our visits (always on weekend mornings) we’ve found the clientele to skew far more non-Mexican/Hispanic than at our usual ports of call for Mexican food. But this is not to say that the food is watered down or Americanized—far from it; but the menu is, nonetheless, not quite as hardcore as some of those other places (more on this below). Continue reading →