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Nuevo Laredo Cantina
Nuevo Laredo Cantina opened in 1990 in Houston's Rice Military neighborhood, built around a specifically Northern Mexican and Tex-Mex culinary tradition distinct from the more generic combination-plate format found at many American Mexican restaurants of the era. The restaurant became particularly known for its fajitas and its chile relleno, dishes prepared using traditional techniques the owners specifically sourced from Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican border city the restaurant takes its name from, giving the menu a more regionally specific identity than its casual cantina atmosphere might suggest. The restaurant's laid-back, unpretentious cantina setting, combined with a well-regarded margarita program, made it a long-standing neighborhood favorite among Houston diners specifically seeking a more regionally authentic alternative to the city's larger Tex-Mex chains. Nuevo Laredo Cantina's combination of its specifically Northern Mexican border-region culinary focus and its multi-decade standing as a genuine Houston neighborhood institution has made it one of the more regionally distinctive Mexican restaurants anywhere in Texas.
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El Cholo
El Cholo traces back to 1922, when Alejandro and Rosa Borquez opened a small eatery on Western Avenue originally called the Sonora Cafe. As the story goes, a customer sketched a figure on the menu in 1925 and the nickname stuck, and the restaurant was rechristened El Cholo — a name a family restaurant built for a broad Los Angeles audience, rather than a specific immigrant neighborhood, has carried for a century since. It's now run by the sixth generation of the Borquez family, one of the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurants in the city, with the Western Avenue location still its flagship. The green corn tamales are the restaurant's most specifically beloved dish — a seasonal item, made only when fresh corn is available, wrapped and steamed the traditional way, that regulars plan visits around rather than treating as just another menu item. The restaurant's margarita program has built its own separate reputation, cited for decades as among the best traditional margaritas in the city. Rather than the corn-tortilla street format that defines most modern taquerias, El Cholo's tacos and broader menu sit closer to a classic American-Mexican and Tex-Mex tradition — flour tortillas, combination plates, and a full sit-down dining room service, the kind of format that shaped how generations of Americans without a personal connection to Mexican regional cooking first encountered the cuisine. El Cholo has grown into a small group of Los Angeles-area locations over its long history, but it's never abandoned the Western Avenue original or the format that built its reputation in the first place — a rare thing for a restaurant nearing its hundredth year in business.
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