To get a sense of how many Mexican restaurants, markets, cafes, panaderías, taquerías, tortillerías and taco trucks there are in San Antonio, it helps to know that 15 of them call Blanco Road home. More than 15, really. A lot more. But I’m talking about 15 in a single one-mile stretch bisecting Basse Road.
San Antonio is a star map of streets like Blanco, radiating hundreds of points of light along the spiral galaxy of Mexican food. I’ve laid down more than 750 pins on that map, almost a third of my total restaurant visits as a food writer here. Motivated by those experiences and 50 more in the past month, today I’m ranking the Top 25 Mexican Restaurants in San Antonio. It’s a ranking we’ve never done for the scene as a whole, although we’ve torn off pieces of it for best tacos, best cheese enchiladas, best panaderías, and best menudo.
Like the terrain, the culture and the food of the country it draws from, the list of San Antonio’s Top 25 Mexican Restaurants is all over the map. One’s a grocery store with tacos to-go and barbacoa on the weekends. One does sushi. One’s a Korean fusion thing. One’s a local treasure or a tourist trap, depending on your level of detachment. One’s been recognized on a national level and stands among the most elegant restaurant experiences in the city. One proudly identifies as Tex-Mex at a time when we’re finding more expansive ways to talk about the food that evolved along a border that didn’t even exist for thousands of years, a conversation without hyphens.
That’s a conversation worth having. And we will. But today, I’m exploring my corner of the known Mexican food universe, the one where San Antonio and the sky above it are the only limits.
Satisfy your cravings with the best eats and recipes in the San Antonio area
CreditsReporting and visuals by Mike Sutter. Editing by Jan Waddy. Project management by Angela Alcala-Bach and Brittany Schell / Hearst DevHub. Powered by the Hearst Newspapers DevHub.
Originally published on Sept. 28, 2023
Dining and Cooking