Whereas love drives the best flavor in dishes, for the dish I had here, it seemed more like nostalgia. You know, as if the full flavor of the dish I was eating was left in an ideal past and traded by some mediocre idea in the present. The taste of this dish was certainly mediocre, if not shameful and disappointing.
What I had was either an enchilada, a taco, or a burrito. I cannot remember. Somebody once commented on the peculiarity of today's Mexican cuisine, how it had been reduced to a sloppy dish made of the recombined same ingredients, or stuff. Like: Put the stuff in a soft tortilla and call it a burrito, put it in a hard tortilla and call it taco, wrap it up really tightly and call it a flauta: At the end of the day, you shouldn't worry about remembering what you ate: You had the same 'stuff', merely recombined.
El Toro Loco failed even to provide the best of these recombined creations. It utterly failed as it seemed I bit into yesterday's rice, and the beans had been watered down with milk or water so much as to be deemed insipid. They had been liquified without the proper spices to the point of losing their entire bean feeling. The only thing you could praise about these was the fact that they left no remains on your teeth. It seemed the flour tortillas had been shipped from California in plastic bags rather than made by the chefs and it seemed the chefs, if I may call them that, lacked even the sense to heat them on a 'comal' or flat plan, but rather zapped them for 10 seconds in the microwave. I know, I have tasted real tortillas, and they are neither a) elastic, b) hard to cut with your fork, and c) they do not stick to the roof of your mouth.
I, who grew up amid Latin American cuisine, know that this food that was placed in front of me was the cusp of a decadent food culture reduced to this mush by the expectations of the new culture. We should, as clients, request to taste the real beans, the real rice, the real tortillas. We should not be mocked by this mass brought to us in plates pretending to be authentic Mexican food. You should ask, when the beans are not dark in color, WHY ARE THESE BEANS NOT DARK IN COLOR? WHY ARE THEY SO WATERY? Mexican restaurants would not lose money by providing real food, condimented with the real spices -cumin! paprika! chili!- and garnished with the freshly chopped cilantro. Beans and rice are cheap; Flour and Maseca (used for corn tortillas) are cheap; lettuce, tomatoes and onions are cheap, and for $6 a dish, you could still surely make a profit.
The cooks in this restaurant got lazy and have lowered their standards to provide run of the mill Mexican food for cheap. The only way I feel I could have really enjoyed the food here would have been had I been drunk, which I was not at the time of my visit.
In short, the Toro Loco was just Another Mexican Place.
Address: 1808 Staples Mill Rd
Richmond, VA 23230
(804) 353-2391
Would I recommend it to others: Obviously not.
Price: Fit for the stuff they feed you.
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Note: The waitstaff did, however, provide an excellent service.
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