Established in 1964 and serving classic Tex-Mex. A bowl of chile con queso arrives at your table with the menu. Go for the combination plate #1.
My father's first store, a little 5 & 10 Variety Store, was on Lyons Avenue and my earliest memories are of this area in the 50's. On a recent visit, I discovered three Mexican restaurants along the street. El Penjamo has a menu featuring the dishes from Northern Mexico and the carne guisada plate looked really good. However, I was here for the Tex-Mex offering and ordered the #1 which was pretty amazing. Check out the color of the cheeses. Looks like they used one of those nacho cheeses for the queso and standard cheddar for the enchiladas. The meal begins with a small bean and fideo soup.
The restaurant was established in 1970 and the recipes are the same as then so we are talking about a time machine, time warp of about 50 years. Classic old school Tex-Mex.
Established in 1984. I came across this time warp treasure via their billboard on Old Galveston Road that I noticed one day when driving back into Houston.
www.lahaciendamemorial.com
If you grew up in the Memorial area, your family probably went to "La-Ha" at least once a week. It is a Tex-Mex institution for Memorialites.
Old Mexico (Northside)
3306 Hopper Road
This is about as old school as you can get. Red tortillas for the enchiladas, salsa and queso served with chips, classic rice and beans. Yep. You will want to get the enchilada plate here. Note: there isn't a sign outside so you may actually pass by Old Mexico the first time that you try to find it.
Las Hadas (Permanently Closed)2428 Center Street, Deer Park, Texas
I really liked, and recommend you order the biggest combination plate on the menu in order to sample a little bit of everything. Although the rice wasn't as light and fluffy as I would like it to be, I thought the frijoles refritos were really good. The beef (picadillo) in the taco tasted cleaner and less greasy than in a lot of places. And the combo plate has real chile con carne gravy instead of the typical chili gravy.
Fiesta Loma Linda - (Permanently Closed)
2111 Telephone Road
http://www.fiestalomalinda.com
(We are sad to advise that, after 62 years, Fiesta Loma Linda closed in May of 2018):
Our favorite because of the classic, Houston style puffy tacos that they continue to make and make well. Originally a classic diner, the owners friendship with the owners of the now long gone Loma Linda Restaurant by Palms Center, follow the original Loma Linda recipes.
El Paraiso (on Fairview in Montrose) ( Permanently Closed)2320 Crocker Street
El Paraiso, too, prepares class Tex-Mex, and also offers house made moles and a few northern Mexico regional dishes.
Spanish Village Restaurant (Permanently Closed)4720 Almeda Road
http://www.spanishvillagetx.com
With new ownership, and a new ownership, with the classic recipes prepared well, and with the closing of Fiesta Loma Linda, Spanish Village is my default go-to Mexican restaurant in Houston. As of March 2022, they have changed the way they make sauces. Now made in small batches. The larger batch prep of the past, that often led to burned tasting chili gravy, burned taco shells, burned tortilla chips, has been fixed with the newest management. One can see, from the menu, that there is a more serious focus on fajitas in place of the traditional combination plates. Birria, shrimp tacos and caldo de camarón have been added to the menu. It's funny but, what I really look forward to eating here isn't necessarily the combination plate but (imho) their most delicious shrimp soup (see photo)
Don Teo's (Permanently Closed)2026 W. 34th Street
http://www.donteos.com
The story of Don Teo's is pretty interesting. This location was one of the original Monterey Houses in Houston, this one franchised to Don Covington. Now in his 80's, he still comes by for Tex-Mex every week. The Martinez family that own it now, Don Teo and his son, Teo Jr., worked for decades for the Monterey House chain. Junior began as a kid and worked his way through the various stations of a restaurant. He is an absolute delight to chat with and we recommend to be sure to say "Hi" when you visit.
More Notes on Doña María and from culinary historian Adán Medrano
Doña María on Navigation
This Houston institution slipped by me. I’d never been. I knew that it was historically significant to the max. On previous attempts, it was always too crowded. “Next time”, I would say. But recently, having seen a photo of their puffy taco, I knew that it was a “must”.
Damn, that puffy taco plate was good. The rice and beans that accompanied it were great. As were the tacos. Crunchy. Not those softer, chewier, thick masa ones that SA is known for. A tad thicker than the ones at the (now closed) beloved Fiesta Loma Linda.
And, I saw that caldo de menudo is a daily feature. Not just on weekends.
This is a breakfast and lunch place. It closes at 2:00 pm.
Adán Medrano, culinary historian and author of two superb books on the cuisine of Mexicano cuisine in Texas, wrote the following for The Houston Press, part of articles he did as he explored Mexican restaurants on Navigation. Here is a link to the Houston Press article:
The Houston Press - Adán Medrano
Both of Adán's books are available at the River Oaks Bookstore and also online from Amazon (support local businesses as your first priority though)
He wrote:
"Doña María Mexican Café serves the type of breakfast tacos that are at the heart of traditional Mexican American home cooking. The cafe is one in a six-cluster of restaurants on Navigation that reveal the original, indigenous culinary traditions of Houston.
Taco choices include scrambled eggs with either chorizo, potato, chicharrón (bits of pork skin), or with country sausage, all of them cooked to order, à la minute. A delicious option for any of the tacos is to add pinto beans cooked in the traditional way, mashed and pan-roasted with very little oil, if any. As for me, I’m hopelessly in love with the straightforward combination of scrambled eggs and pinto beans, just a little salt. Why gild the lily?
The menu offers full breakfast plates like the familiar and well-executed huevos rancheros and eggs a la Mexicana with diced fresh jalapeño, but also the lesser known machacado con huevo, this last one truly a core tradition. Machacado is made with meat that has been salted and air-dried, a technique employed for centuries in Texas, salt being central to Native American cooking. It was first employed because it was necessary for food preservation, but today it’s the flavor appeal that keeps the technique a constant one.
My dad and most of his generation dried venison and also beef. He sliced it as thin as paper, cut it into large sheets (sábanas) then salted and air-dried it. To make machacado from these sheets, they are pounded on a mortar, crushed into strands, like thin threads. “Machacar” means to crush. Then the strands are scrambled with eggs, sometimes adding a trio of diced green chile, onions and tomato. The breakfast machado plate is served with traditional mashed pinto beans, cubed potatoes, and a side of tortillas. It’s a favorite of the regulars at Doña María and if you’ve never tried it, go ahead and step into the welcoming world of Texas Mexican cooking. 
Anna Hernandez is the owner of Doña María Mexican Café, along with her husband Juan, and they feature recipes that are traditional in Mexican American families.
Photo by Adán Medrano
Doña María was founded in 1988 by María Piñeda (hence the restaurant name) and in 2005, Anna and Juan took over the business, keeping some of the recipes but replacing many with those of Anna’s family. Anna is from Houston and Juan is from Mercedes in the Rio Grande Valley, so their menu is 100 percent comida casera, home-cooking, of Texas Mexican American families.
Picadillo, ground beef with vegetables, potatoes, one of the iconic dishes of the Mexican food of Texas.
Photo by Adán Medrano
Picadillo and fideo are prime examples of this unique cuisine. Picadillo is ground beef stewed with onions, carrots, bell pepper, potatoes, and seasoned with a trinity of spices unique to Texas Mexican cooking, the combination of garlic, black pepper and cumin. Order that, and I’m back home, with mom and impish siblings.
Fideo is an iconic dish of Texas Mexican cooking, pan roasted vermicelli in a seasoned tomato broth. Doña María adds a slice of poached chicken breast.
Photo by Adán Medrano
Sous Chef, Ever Ochoa, prepares the mole, sauces and heads up the production line in the kitchen.
Photo by Adán Medrano
Fideo is another dish that is iconic in the Mexican food of Texas. Vermicelli pasta is first pan-roasted to acquire color, then boiled with tomato, onion and seasonings. Chef Ochoa adds a large slice of chicken breast, and it’s a full, scrumptious meal. Like the picadillo, fideo is so traditional that it’s an indelible taste memory of the East End community.
No truly Texas Mexican dish is complete without flour tortillas, the wheat culinary creation born in the Texas and Mexico region that extends along a band 150 miles north and 150 miles south of the Rio Grande, once just a river to the indigenous peoples, now a geopolitical border. You know it’s an expert tortilla when it balloons magnificently on the comal, griddle.
Griselda Delgado Lamas makes them daily at Doña María, mixing and kneading the dough before shaping small balls that she rolls out and cooks. She’ll make about 300 each day, and sometimes 500 for a big catering job. Griselda has been making the Doña María tortillas already for 10 years. She’s fast, making them in the San Antonio and Rio Grande Valley style, laying them on the griddle for a few seconds, then turning them over and watching them puff up, soft and lithesome. Simply delicious.
Traditional Texas Mexican tortillas puff up on the griddle. Master tortilla maker, Griselda Delgado Ochoa, flips them effortlessly, lightly.
Photo by Adán Medrano
A Gastro Obscura Article from 2016 on the taco:
The Texan Who Invented Chili Powder Also Accidentally Created the American Taco
BY DAN NOSOWITZ JANUARY 14, 2016
For many Americans, a taco looks like this: a U-shaped deep-fried corn tortilla shell filled with seasoned ground beef, shredded iceberg lettuce, cheddar cheese, and maybe salsa or chopped tomatoes. It’s
emoji-level recognizable, an ’80s and ’90s childhood staple. But the taco’s detractors have been taking aim in recent times. “A few years back, like watching a favorite childhood movie and noticing how terrible it really is, I finally realized that hard taco shells are a sham,” wrote
Serious Eats food writer J. Kenji López-Alt in a 2011 post reminiscing about the less-than-stellar taco nights of his childhood. Anthony Bourdain has
repeatedly lashed out at Taco Bell and Tex-Mex for sullying the true Mexican taco with dirty American ingredients.
Like General Tso’s chicken or a meatball parm sandwich, it seems logical that the American taco has no real relationship to its original culture. A carnitas taco served on a paper plate in Mexico City—that’s authentic. A ground beef taco served by a Taco Bell in Indianapolis, well, that’s something else. Something worse.
But where did the American taco really come from? And what does it say about us?
First of all, it’s a mistake to believe that the iconic hard shell taco is something that clueless white people invented. “Both Americans and Mexicans would love to believe that the hard-shell taco was a travesty of an invention by clueless
gabachos. But that’s simply not the case,” says Gustavo Arellano, perhaps America’s foremost scholar on the taco. Arellano is the writer behind the advice column “Ask A Mexican,” the author of
Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and also the editor of the OC Weekly newspaper in his native Orange County, California.
“Mexicans have been eating what we now call tacos since time immemorial,” says Arellano. “The idea of stuffing something into a tortilla—we’ve been doing that since there were tortillas, so we’re talking thousands of years ago.” But Mexican cuisine is incredibly regional, being almost as varied in climate and geography as the U.S., from deserts in the north to the tropics in the south, the Sierra Madre mountain range in the west to central valleys. And Mexican cuisine is a product of varied influences the same way American cuisine is; the many different Indian populations; the Spanish conquest; waves of immigrants from North, South, and (especially recently) Central America; French, German, and Jewish immigrants from Europe during World War II; Lebanese and other Arab immigrants who brought meat-on-a-spit traditions.
All of these blended together and were filtered through the ingredients that people had at hand. There are old ways of doing things, and newer ways. But they’re all Mexican, and for Arellano, “good” and “bad” are largely unrelated to “old” and “new.” The term “authentic” is entirely meaningless.
Tacos, says Arellano, were until the 1800s generally more popular in central and southern Mexico, where more common fillings would be pork, chicken, seafood, or vegetables. But the taco’s popularity increased in the 19th century in the north, and northern Mexicans had a different meat of choice. “All of northern Mexico is beef country,” says Arellano. “Sonora, Baja California, Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua, that’s where beef is king.” That was as true north of the border as south. “Putting a whole bunch of ground beef on a flour tortilla is a cowboy tradition,” says Robb Walsh, a Galveston-based food writer and authority on all things Texas, from barbecue to Tex-Mex. (He also, coincidentally, went to the same elementary school as Arellano before moving back to Texas.)
There are a few different types of beef tacos; carne asada, grilled hunks of beef, is most common, but lengua, tongue, along with a few other offal cuts especially from around the cow’s head are also easy to find. Ground beef, though, of the type you’d find in Taco Bell? That would be most recognizable in northern Mexico as picadillo.
Picadillo is a dish consisting primarily of minced or ground meat and is found in pretty much every country Spain ever had a hand in, from Mexico to Cuba to the Philippines. It varies from country to country and region to region; in Caribbean cuisines, especially Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican, it’s often cooked with raisins and olives and served with rice. In Mexico it varies in form, sometimes served as a soup, sometimes cooked with less liquid with potatoes (sort of like a hash), and sometimes even drier and less saucy and served in a taco.
Crispy tacos, too, exist perfectly authentically, whatever that means, in Mexico, and have for quite a long time. Sometimes they’re called tacos dorados, or golden tacos, and if the taco is first rolled into a cigar shape before frying can be called a taquito or sometimes a flauta, depending on size or just local terminology. “They’re often made with potatoes and eaten during lent,” says Arellano. The main differences between tacos dorados and a Taco Bell taco is that the filling may be slightly different, and will be fried to order (and sometimes fried whole) rather than placed in a pre-fried shell. But really, they’re not all that different.
In 1914, the recipe widely cited as the earliest known recipe for tacos was published, by Bertha Haffner-Ginger in a book called
California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook. Her recipe describes the taco as follows:
“Made by putting chopped cooked beef and chile sauce in tortilla made of meal and flour; folded, edges sealed together with egg; fried in deep fat, chile sauce served over it.”
This would not easily recognizable as a taco today; I think most would identify this dish as an empanada. But the parts are all there, setting the stage for Old El Paso and Taco Bell.
The story of most American adaptation of new dishes in the 19th and 20th centuries relies on two processes: preservation and mass production.
In the late 19th century, the Mexican-influenced dish of choice in the U.S. was chili con carne, not the taco. In Mexico, dried chile peppers are and have always been a major part of the cuisine, but are sold whole, to be toasted and rehydrated or otherwise prepared as the cook desires. The chief innovation that made the American taco possible was chili powder, a store-bought item not found in Mexico.
Chili powder was first sold in 1894 by its inventor, Texan-by-way-of-Germany Willie Gebhardt, for use in chili. “What people don’t seem to appreciate is that getting ingredients back then was not as easy as it is today,” says Arellano. “Today you go to your local Latino supermarket and you can get whatever. Back then, you had to improvise.” Gebhardt was unable to find the chile peppers he wanted year-round, and so bought a huge stockpile of the peppers, which were probably ancho, and ran them through a meat grinder a few times to pulverize them. He later began selling the powder already made—a huge convenience for anyone wanting to make the then-trendy chili. (German immigrants in Texas also tended to wrap their own sausages in tortillas, an early Mexican fusion cuisine, as Arellano
told SF Weekly.)
The other ingredients—cumin powder, tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, ground beef—have connections to parts of northern Mexico, but to suss them out would be to ignore the real reason they were used: that’s what was readily available in America at the time. Cheddar cheese is hardly ever found in Mexico, but in the U.S., it’s the second-most-popular variety, after mozzarella. And it was already being used often in Texas, especially in concert with ground beef, in the hamburger. So, sure, cheddar cheese. That’s what’s here, why not?
The next major step in the development of the American taco was fast food. “Glen Bell, of Taco Bell fame, he got the idea for Taco Bell after watching the McDonald brothers get insanely rich in San Bernardino, California,” says Arellano. Bell had a hamburger and hot dog stand right across the street from a popular Mexican restaurant, and by 1951 he had reverse-engineered the taco and began selling it, including the tacos dorados popular in southern California. But, inspired by the McDonald’s ideas of interchangeable parts made in advance, Bell came up with a new idea. “Glen Bell is credited as coming up with the pre-formed taco shell,” says Walsh. And that turned out to be a turning point for the fast-food industry.
Arellano doesn’t think there’s much more to the comparison of hamburgers and tacos than that, but I can’t help seeing massive similarities between the two. These are both ground meat-based dishes served in starch out of drive-thru fast food places, making them perfect for on-the-go eating. They’re both commonly served with lettuce, tomato, onion, and cheese. They’re constructed the same way; all that needs to be done is to cook the meat and assemble everything else in the right order. “Picadillo has been part of Mexican cooking forever,” says Walsh. “I’m sure that is an older tradition than Sloppy Joes.” That’s true, and explains the origins of the food, but for an American in 1965 who wants to try ethnic food, the roots of the dish wouldn’t be clear at all. What I think they’d see is basically a hamburger in a different, more fun form. Arellano disagrees.
“Intellectuals have always underestimated Americans when it comes to Mexican food,” says Arellano. But Mexican food remains in the pantheon of foreign foodstuffs that by now are just…American food, along with elements of Italian and Chinese cuisines. “Americans have always sought out what they thought in that moment to be authentic Mexican food,” says Arellano, whether that was chili con carne in the 1880s, tamales in the 1930s, hard-shell beef tacos in the 1960s, or Mission-style burritos in the 2010s. He sees the American love of new foods, including Mexican, as an earnest attempt to explore and try new things—it’s just that, sometimes, only certain elements of those new foods are available.
Regardless, the American taco became unavoidable by the 1960s: you could get it at a fast-food joint, or you could buy a kit from brands like Old El Paso or Ashley’s. These kits would include seasoning packets, sometimes ground beef, the tortillas (which disturbingly were sometimes sold in cans), and a mold so you could fry the shells in place. This spoke to 1950s and 1960s Americans: the taco dinner was cheap, sort of exotic but sort of familiar, and everything was basically premade.
Arellano recommends taking the taco, American and Mexican, for what it is, and not what those Arellano calls “authentistas” would like it to be. “Mexicans and Americans have romanticized Mexican food as being somehow more true and pure than American food,” he says. “And Mexican food is really the original mongrel cuisine. And that’s what makes it so delicious.” Really, there’s no part of the American taco that would preclude it from being tasty—nobody says you have to use a premade seasoning packet of stale, bland spices, or a brittle, prepackaged taco shell. Giving as little care to basically anything as Americans often do to the taco will result in lousy food, whether it’s Sloppy Joes or boeuf bourguignon.
In other words: get off the hard-shell taco’s back.
