We had dinner at Enrique’s Mexican Cuisine in Monrovia on Tuesday, October 4, 2011, my birthday eve. We first heard of the restaurant a week or two before when we bought a coupon from Amazon for $10 that covered $20 worth of an order there. We looked up their menu online and found them to be moderately priced and that it would be fairly easy to spend $20 there. There were also several things on the menu that I could eat. A few weeks later on Tuesday, October 4 we left home at 6:17 p.m. We drove west on the 210 in fairly light traffic. Most of the traffic was driving east. We exited at Myrtle Ave. and turned right to go north on Myrtle. There was some traffic on this street. At one intersection we noticed a yellow building on the left side that had the HP logo on it. We drove into Old Town Monrovia where the street became just 2 opposite lanes and rather narrow with angled parking on either side. We turned right on Colorado Blvd., another narrow street that to the west connects to Colorado Blvds in Arcadia, Pasadena, Eagle Rock, and Glendale. We looked on the right for Enrique’s as we passed a public parking lot. We found it at the southwest corner of Colorado Blvd. and Ivy Ave. It looked small and crowded with a group of people waiting outside. We saw some outdoor seating and figured we could do that if it was too crowded even though it was in the 60s and cool outside. There was no space to park on the street. We turned right on Ivy Ave. and made another right into an alley that led to the free public parking lot where there were plenty of spaces.
We walked the short distance to the restaurant, entered a room in which every table was full, and found the host desk just past the room along the left wall. The servers there said we could sit anywhere and we noticed another room just past the desk. There were a couple of tables along the window and several pushed together in the middle. In the room was also the open kitchen where the orders were delivered, the dispenser of the Coke product beverages and some juices such as jamaica. On a high shelf was a projector facing the wall above the beverage dispensers. I wonder if this was to show films or turn the place into a club. High on most walls were hung colorful paper cut outs. Above the open kitchen there was a large mural. It was dark when we sat down in the room but they turned on some lights soon after. The music playing over the speakers was Spanish rock including “Gotas de Agua Dulce” by Juanes and my guilty pleasure that I downloaded from Freegal, “El Matador” by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. A party of 5-6 adults and 5-6 young blond boys sat at the tables pushed together near us. It was a birthday party for one of the boys, Sutton. Another boy, Grayson, was a bit mischievous. At one point he spilled some water and at another we saw that he wasn’t wearing his shoes. They never got so loud that we couldn’t enjoy our time there. We overheard one of their mothers trying to order a cheeseburger for them but they were out of cheeseburgers.
The menus consisted of several brown pages with black text. There were many sections, usually two per page including appetizers, combinaciones, tacos, burritos, tamales, mariscos, specialties, kids menu, and dessert. There was also a menu insert with “Taco Tuesday” specials for tacos and drinks. The tacos section of the regular menu included Tacos de Cochinita whose description contained the word “delicioius.” The dessert section included sopapillas that we think was supposed to be sopaipillas, only the “i” was removed and appeared in “delicioius.” The prices ranged from around $8 for burritos to $10-$13 for entrees, to over $15. Most came with rice and beans. The specialties section included both beef and chicken fajitas and I believe that the mariscos section included shrimp fajitas. After some thought, we placed our orders. They had placed a basket of chips on our table soon after we sat down along with a small bowl of slightly spicy and fire-roasted salsa. The salsa was a bit too “liquid” for the chips but it still tasted good.
Our orders came fairly quickly on hot oval plates. My wife got the Chile Marinero that was a large green chile pepper covered in a green sauce and stuffed with shrimp and nuts. She enjoyed it along with the rice and beans on her plate. Her only complaint was the cilantro that she had to scrape off the pepper. I requested that my entrée come with just rice and no beans and they complied. It was the Nopalitos con Carnitas that was chunks of nopalito cactus along with pork carnitas and spicy green sauce. It came with three corn tortillas to make little tacos. The pork, cactus, and green sauce were very spicy but still very good with smoky flavor along with the spice. My plate came with an extra amount of rice that went well with the entrée. I also had it with some chips from the basket. It was a decent amount of food.
After we finished our entrees my wife ordered the sopapillas for dessert. It took several minutes for them to be made to order. They came as five sopapillas, light and crispy cinnamon and sugar pastries shaped like little pillows. They surrounded some vanilla ice cream that was just the right consistency. The sopapillas were also very good and the entire dessert was very reasonably priced at $3.50.
After finishing our meal, the total price was very reasonable even before we got the $20 off with our coupon. We left and drove back the way we came. Last year we went to Oak Glen and Eureka Burger on my birthday eve. This year, the new place was Enrique’s in Old Town Monrovia.
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