Guns and Tacos

La Carreta

August 15th, 2009 in Tacos! by Jay | 4 responses

This place has been here since 1973, which is why any long-time Heights resident will recommend it. No matter what their age, they’ve been eating here since ________.

“I’ve been eating here since ________”, I’ve realized, is not so much of a recommendation towards the fine cuisine of an establishment, but more of a testament to the person recommending it.

There are a lot of places I enjoyed dining at as a teenager. Going back to these places to eat several years later, I’ve realized that you can come to one of the following conclusions:

A: This place has really gone downhill since I ate here years ago.

B. Since I got out of said hometown, I learned what good food really is.

But some folks (and probably most folks) never leave their hometown and alas, they still think that the Mexican restaurant in their neighborhood is top-notch.

La Carreta is that place.

I stopped there Friday evening, and parked next to a dude sleeping in his car. Which is fine with me, because his car was running. In Houston, in August, in the daytime,  if someone is sleeping in their car and it is not running, he is not sleeping.

I ordered a lemonade. For some reason, some areas in the Houston Heights are dry.  As much as the ‘dry area’ concept pisses me off, it is probably a good thing for some areas of the Heights. Like most legitimate Mexican-owned establishments, the limonada was fantastic, and made with real lime juice. To clarify, if you order lemonade in a real Mexican restaurant, you’ll probably get limeade. Which is a good thing.

Have you ever used Rotel tomatoes from a can? If you have, perhaps you poured out the juice before you used the Rotel tomatoes for your purpose. What ever happened to that juice, you may ponder? I can tell you. It’s right here, and I’m dipping my tortilla chips in it, here at La Carreta.

I had been told that this place had some great lengua tacos. Seeing as the place didn’t have lengua tacos on their menu, I realized that the person who told me that probably hadn’t eaten here in a decade or two.

Unfortunately, La Carreta only has two types of tacos on their menu, crispy and soft. It is important to know that if you see the word “crispy” or “soft” on any Mexican restaurant menu, you’re already screwed; unless of course, you’ve been eating there for the past ten years. (I’ll get into that later in another post.)

I ordered from the “House Specialties” section, and got the Carnitas Rancheras, which consists of fried pork, smothered with a spicy tomato salsa. Complete with rice and beans. I also ordered a crispy beef taco for the hell of it, even though I knew what to expect. My companion ordered a combination plate with cheese enchiladas.

I don’t normally getting anything “a la ranchera” unless I’m getting huevos rancheros. It’s okay to dump a bunch of chunky peppery sauce on bland items like fried eggs, but if you order something that you’re intended to taste, such as seafood for example, you’re going to drown it in this stuff and you won’t taste anything.

The pork chunks were slow-roasted, seasoned well and very tender, and I enjoyed it. However, my companion, a gorgeous blonde vixen of perfect proportions, told me that the cheese enchiladas “tasted like single-slice Kraft and sweaty balls”.

She then asked me why everyone eating there was weird looking. This bothered me at first. “Who could be so insensitive?”, I thought. Until I looked around and saw that most of the dining audience was utilizing some sort of motorized ambulation.

Another thing that bothered me was, although the temperature of the room didn’t seem to be terribly hot, I was burning up.  Now I’m not one to complain about temperature, partly because everybody else does. But I was sweating.

I had a brick wall to my left, and realized that the wall was hot to the touch. Apparently I had chosen the wall opposite of the oven in the kitchen, and the brick wall was the only thing separating me from the inside of the cooking oven. By the time I figured it out, I was ordering boxes for the rest of our uneaten dishes.

If you like Casa Ole and Los Tios, you may like La Carreta. The one outstanding thing about La Carreta is, the prices are really low. I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, and it was 8 bucks. Most of the menu items were around $5 . If you’re not concerned about Mexican authenticity, you can’t beat the value here.