Cascabel Taqueria

Yep, the Upper East Side has Mexican cuisine. I’d previously enjoyed Maya greatly, so it was time to explore Cascabel Taqueria, a restaurant that takes Mexican “street food” and tweaks it just a little bit to bring it to a different, more sophisticated level.

Named for the peppers that rattle when shaken, Cascabel offers a wide variety of choices using a full spectrum of meats, seafood, and vegetables, including eight different varieties of their signature tacos.

The luchador theme is strong here, and a lot of fun. Who doesn’t prefer their wrestlers to be masked, anyway?

We started with drinks, I with a Kelso pilsner — a pleasant, clean local lager — while my friend ordered from the list of margaritas, choosing a hibiscus-pomegranate version. As you can see, it’s not the froofy frozen stuff, instead served in a Mason jar. This was proclaimed “tart and refreshing”, while marveling that it’s a bigger jar than at lunch. Thus slaked, we set to ordering a ton of food.

I wanted to try the tacos, naturally, and the menu offers pretty much every general type one could want: two for $8.50, three for $11.75. Ooh, what a great way to try three different ones! Oh, but wait: you can only order the three-taco offering at lunch, and… each order consists of only one taco type. Wanna try two different tacos? Order two two-taco plates. Grudgingly, I accepted this as it’s not a Cascabel review without tacos.

While we waited for the food to arrive, we sampled the three sauces Cascabel offers. The roasted tomato and tomatillo were pleasant, flavorful red and green sauces without much heat; but the Diablo Fire Sauce really packs a kick, a very tasty kick. I’d use it sparingly anyway to let the prepared flavors shine, but there’s no dousing your tacos with this.

First up, the housemade chorizo, with piquillo pepper aioli, on the signature metal tray (everything arrives on these, which quickly fill all table space). The aioli’s the orangish, saucy-looking liquid. The other liquid is, of course, chorizo grease. I’m always on the lookout for good chorizo, and this didn’t disappoint. Lots of spicy heat, and the cool crunch of the cilantro and onion worked well with the pepper aioli to modulate that fire. The chorizo itself wasn’t nearly as oily as the picture would have you believe.

Queso Fundito: more chorizo, plus roasted poblanos all covered with a thick layer of chihuahua cheese and cooked in the oven in a cast-iron pan.

For gooey deliciousness, it’s tough to beat meat and melted cheese, especially when both are of high quality. And that cheese curtain! Lots of flavor in this dish, a hearty recommend. It arrives with a parcel containing four tortillas, helpful for sopping up the gooeyness, or making a bunch of mini-tacos.

Then the tacos arrived, all four on one tray. This is the lengua taco, reasonably small chunks of lightly-cooked tongue topped with pepper and tomato, and a crunchy… you know, we never did figure out what the crunchy bits were. But they were a pleasant complement to the chewy tongue, so juicy the taco wound up being soaked before I was halfway through it.

The inside view, a little shaky, reveals that tenderness, along with of course the double-tortilla action.

The pescado taco is dressed with a lot of hearts of palm, only a little green olive (to my non-dismay), and onion, all surrounding a generous amount of lightly-breaded yellowfin tuna. The fish was moist and flaky, cooked to pretty much perfection. I enjoyed these greatly, but I have to say, I’d like to see more places with a credible fish taco around here so I could get a better feel for what a fish taco can be. I can’t be flying out West all the time now, though I really ought to look into that.

For a buck, how can you not end the evening with bite-size churros? Cinnamon-sugared deep-fried perfection, again served in a street-food-appropriate paper bag, not a thing wrong with these — though sure, a little chocolate on the side wouldn’t have hurt.

I recommend Cascabel easily. It’s not expensive — two people ate a lot for under $50 with a drink each. The food is tasty and filling. And the menu is packed with similarly-attractive options. I know I need to go back at least for a different set of tacos a couple of times, and the main dishes aside from tacos appeal as well; heck, there was a lack of non-chorizo pork and beef in my dinner choices that I should remedy. Service is perfectly okay, even if the tacos overlapped the starters by a bit and made the table cramped and tough to navigate. It’s crowded in there, and the servers and busboys have it rough on busy nights which, by all accounts, are every night they’re open. So, do yourself, and your wallet, a favor, and come up to my part of the world for some great Mexican fare!