Nuevo Laredo Cantina

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• Top 6 Mexican Restaurants in America

  Currently #6 · score 0

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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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• Rosa Mexicano

  Rosa Mexicano opened in 1984 on Manhattan's Upper East Side, founded by restaurateur Josefina Howard, who built the restaurant specifically to introduce upscale, regionally authentic Mexican cuisine to New York diners at a time when most Mexican food available in the city leaned heavily toward a more generic Tex-Mex format. The restaurant's tableside-prepared guacamole, mashed and mixed directly at the table using a traditional molcajete mortar in front of diners, became its single most recognized signature, a genuinely theatrical presentation that's been widely imitated at other upscale Mexican restaurants across the country since. Rosa Mexicano expanded from its original Upper East Side location into a broader multi-city restaurant group, bringing that same tableside guacamole ritual and regionally focused Mexican menu to additional locations while Howard continued overseeing the brand's culinary direction until her death in 2007. Rosa Mexicano's combination of Josefina Howard's pioneering push for regionally authentic upscale Mexican dining in New York and its widely imitated tableside guacamole presentation has made it one of the most influential Mexican restaurant concepts in shaping how American fine dining came to treat the cuisine.

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• Chipotle Mexican Grill

  Chipotle opened its first location in 1993 near the University of Denver, founded by chef Steve Ells, who built the concept around applying fine-dining kitchen technique and ingredient sourcing standards to a fast-casual, assembly-line burrito format, an unusual combination at the time. Ells reportedly needed the restaurant to succeed within a year to keep his family's initial loan afloat, and instead the concept expanded rapidly, eventually attracting significant investment from McDonald's between 1998 and 2006, a corporate relationship that helped fund Chipotle's national expansion before it became a fully independent public company. The chain became one of the most significant pioneers of the broader "fast casual" restaurant category, pairing quick, customizable assembly-line ordering with higher-quality ingredients and no drive-thru, a format that dozens of later competing chains across multiple cuisines have since directly copied. Chipotle's combination of its fine-dining-influenced approach to fast food and its foundational role in creating the entire fast-casual restaurant category has made it one of the most commercially and culturally significant Mexican-inspired restaurant chains in American history.

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• Casa Bonita

  Casa Bonita opened in 1974 in Lakewood, Colorado, built around an enormous, deliberately over-the-top dining experience combining Mexican-American food with entertainment including cliff divers performing above an indoor pool, strolling mariachi bands, and a puppet theater, all under one roof. The restaurant became nationally famous well beyond Colorado after being featured in a 2003 episode of "South Park," whose co-creator Trey Parker had grown up visiting the actual restaurant, an episode that turned Casa Bonita into a broader pop-culture reference point for an entire generation who'd never actually visited. Casa Bonita closed during the COVID-19 pandemic before Parker and fellow "South Park" co-creator Matt Stone purchased the restaurant in 2021 specifically to save and restore it, reopening it in 2023 with renovated dining rooms and performances while preserving the core cliff-diving and entertainment format that made it famous. Casa Bonita's combination of its genuinely theatrical dinner-and-entertainment format and its unlikely rescue and restoration by the creators of the show that made it famous has made it one of the most culturally unusual and specifically beloved Mexican-American restaurants anywhere in the country.

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• Mi Tierra Café

  Mi Tierra Café opened in 1941 in San Antonio's historic Market Square, founded by the Cortez family as a small three-table café serving farmers and vendors working the market, before growing over subsequent decades into a sprawling, 24-hour restaurant and bakery covering an entire city block. The restaurant has operated continuously around the clock, every day of the year, for decades, a genuine rarity for a full-service sit-down restaurant of its size, and its interior is covered floor to ceiling in colorful string lights, murals, and papel picado decorations that stay up permanently rather than being seasonal. Mi Tierra's Mexican bakery, or panadería, operating as part of the same complex, has become one of the most significant sources of traditional Mexican pan dulce in the entire city, drawing customers specifically for its pastry case independent of the restaurant's main dining room. Mi Tierra's combination of its multi-generational Cortez family ownership since 1941, its genuine round-the-clock operating schedule, and its permanently festive, mural-covered dining rooms has made it one of the most culturally significant Mexican restaurants anywhere in Texas.

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More in Food

• Ruffles

  Ruffles was introduced by Frito-Lay in 1958, building specifically on the earlier innovation of ridged potato chips that had been developed and patented by a smaller regional company, Bernhardt "Bert" Kittel, whose original 1954 patent for "Ruffles" ridge-cut potato chips Frito-Lay's predecessor company eventually acquired. The chip's ridged texture was specifically engineered to hold up better under thicker dips than standard flat potato chips, giving Ruffles a distinct functional advantage for dip-based snacking occasions that became central to the brand's marketing positioning. Ruffles grew into one of the best-selling potato chip brands in the United States under Frito-Lay and later PepsiCo ownership, and the brand has released numerous flavor variations over the decades while maintaining its distinctive ridged shape as its core defining product feature. Ruffles's combination of its acquired ridge-cutting patent innovation and its sustained positioning as the go-to potato chip specifically engineered for dipping has made it one of the most commercially significant potato chip brands in American snack food history.

• Fritos

  Fritos were created by Charles Elmer Doolin in 1932, who purchased a corn chip recipe and production equipment from a Mexican restaurant owner in San Antonio, Texas for $100, initially producing the chips in his mother's kitchen before founding the Frito Company to scale up production. The Frito Company merged with H.W. Lay & Company in 1961 to form Frito-Lay, combining Doolin's corn chip business with Herman Lay's potato chip operation into what became one of the largest snack food companies in the United States before PepsiCo's 1965 acquisition of the combined company. Fritos became particularly associated with Texas and broader Southwestern American food culture, and the chip's distinctive corn flavor and crunch made it a foundational ingredient in dishes like Frito pie, a casserole-style dish combining the chips with chili and cheese that remains a regional comfort food staple. Fritos's combination of its founder's humble $100 recipe purchase and its foundational role in Frito-Lay's formation has made it one of the most historically significant corn snack brands in American food history.

• Cheetos

  Cheetos was created in 1948 by Charles Elmer Doolin, founder of the Frito Company, who developed the cheese-flavored corn snack using leftover equipment from his existing Fritos corn chip production line, extruding corn dough into puffed shapes before coating them in cheese powder. The brand's mascot, Chester Cheetah, introduced in television advertising in 1986, became one of the most recognized animated snack food mascots in American advertising, known for his sunglasses and characteristically mischievous personality across decades of continuous television commercials. Cheetos became part of Frito-Lay following Doolin's Frito Company's 1961 merger with H.W. Lay & Company, and the brand's product line expanded significantly to include both puffed and crunchy variations, along with the notably spicy "Flamin' Hot" line that grew into a significant standalone sub-brand and cultural phenomenon in its own right. Cheetos's combination of its origins repurposing Fritos production equipment and its Flamin' Hot line's outsized cultural significance has made it one of the most commercially and culturally influential snack brands in American food history.

• Pringles

  Pringles was developed by Procter & Gamble and launched in 1968, engineered specifically to solve problems associated with traditional potato chips, including breakage during shipping and inconsistent shapes, by creating a uniformly saddle-shaped chip made from a dehydrated potato-based dough rather than sliced whole potatoes. The chip's distinctive tall cylindrical can, designed to prevent the crushing and breakage common with bag-packaged chips, became one of the brand's most recognizable and legally significant design features, and the container's inventor, Fredric Baur, was so proud of the design that part of his cremated remains were reportedly placed inside a Pringles can at his request. Because Pringles are made from reconstituted potato dough rather than being sliced directly from whole potatoes, the product faced early regulatory and labeling disputes in several countries over whether it could legally be marketed simply as a "potato chip" or required a different classification. Pringles's combination of its engineering-driven uniform-shape design solving shipping and packaging problems and its inventor's famously devoted attachment to the product's iconic can has made it one of the most distinctively engineered snack brands in the food industry.

• Doritos

  Doritos originated at Disneyland in the early 1960s, reportedly developed from surplus tortillas at a restaurant in the park's Frontierland area that were being fried and seasoned rather than thrown away, before Frito-Lay acquired the recipe and launched Doritos nationally in 1966. The brand became particularly associated with bold, unconventional flavor innovation, including Cool Ranch, introduced in 1986, and Nacho Cheese, and Doritos has continued releasing limited-edition and unusual flavor variations as a core part of its ongoing marketing strategy. Doritos became one of the most prominent brands in Super Bowl advertising specifically through its long-running "Crash the Super Bowl" contest, launched in 2006, which invited amateur filmmakers to create their own Doritos commercials for a chance to have them air during the broadcast, a genuinely unusual crowdsourced advertising model for a major national brand. Doritos's combination of its unusual Disneyland tortilla-chip origin story and its pioneering crowdsourced "Crash the Super Bowl" advertising campaign has made it one of the most culturally significant and commercially innovative snack brands in the industry.