Kudos to Stephanie M. for getting the FTR (First to Review) for this hidden taqueria. How anyone would know to look inside this non-descript Mexican supermarket for a restaurant is beyond me.
Taqueria Cuernavaca is located inside "Quick Shop Food Mart #2" (storefront sign sub-heading: "Supermercado Y Carniceria") on Roswell Road inside the perimeter (ITP). If traveling south on Roswell Road, the food mart is on your right before the light with the Kroger shopping center. It's on the same side of the road as Kroger. The business can be difficult to find if you don't know what to look for. Here's a storefront picture: http://s3-media1.ak.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/QPA1IfbdR2SG_D28JzF-cw/l.jpg.
Quick Shop Food Mart #2 is pretty like like a gas station convenience store without the gas station. Walk past the counter and aisles of products and you'll find a big open space with lots of table seating. In the very back is a kitchen, a small counter for the cash register, and a refrigerated meat display, much like you'd find at a deli. The display is filled with all sorts of cuts of beef and pork. This is their carniceria.
I stopped by for a Wednesday lunch just before noon and my friends and I were one of only two tables seated. The place was dead. By the time we left, just before 1pm, the place was busy. Besides us, the clientele was 100% Mexican workers.
For a dinky taqueria tucked away in a convenience store, I was surprised at its menu. It looked like a full service Mexican restaurant menu offering the following items: chilaquiles, fajitas, sincronizadas, chicken wings, huevos, flautas, ensaladas, nachos, tostadas, carne asada, mojarra, camarones, coctels de camaron, caldo de res, enchiladas, tamales, burritos, tacos, tortas, picaditas, quesadillas, huaraches, chuletas, chiles rellenos, and then some.
The portion sizes here are huge. I saw someone order one order of fajitas ($12.99-$13.99) and the serving size was ginormous. I've never seen a single serving of fajitas so big. I should've taken a picture. The fajitas are probably the most expensive thing on the menu. Most other entrees are under $10.00 each, unless it's one of the seafood entrees, which are around $12.00 each.
A good thing about the menu is it's colorful, filled with pictures, and there are many English translations -- very helpful if you're not familiar with a lot of authentic Mexican foods.
I ordered two Tostadas de Tinga ($2.99 each) and a Cecina taco ($1.79). All tacos are $1.79 each and they offer the following meats: asada, cecina, pastor, lengua, caveza, chorizo, chivo, res, barbacoa, pollo, suadero, and carnitas. There are a few meats on the taco menu that are hard to find elsewhere in Atlanta, even at other authentic taquerias. I also tried a Tamale de Maiz.
Tostadas de Tinga are spicy shredded chicken tostadas. Ingredients on my Tostadas de Tinga included shredded lettuce, beans, spicy marinated shredded chicken, cheese (fresco or cotija - I couldn't tell), and a creamy white sauce on top of a hard circular corn tortilla. I ordered two because I thought they would be small. I was wrong. They're pretty big (for a $2.99 item) and bigger than what is portrayed on the picture in the menu. The tostadas were freshly made and packed with plenty of meat. Tasty and a good value.
Like the tostadas, my Cecina taco was packed with plenty of meat. In this case, cured beef (cecina). This was a traditional Mexican taco, so all it had inside was the meat and chopped cilantro and onion. There was so much meat in this taco that I had to add sauce to it to make it more juicy. Too much meat is not a bad thing, but it didn't help that cecina is a tougher meat. The ingredients were wrapped inside two corn tortillas and packed inside foil. The taco was accompanied with fresh cut lime wedges, cucumber, and radishes. I really liked the freshness of all the ingredients.
Speaking of fresh ingredients, I went back into the kitchen because I needed to go to the restroom. There's only one restroom for this place and it's inside the kitchen. I noticed two cooks in the back chopping up fresh vegetables like onions, so I already had a sense that our food would be fresh.
I really liked the Tamale de Maiz (2 for $2.00). I like tamales, but I'm not a big fan of opening up the leaves and eating them the traditional way. It's cumbersome. The tamales here are "de-leafed," so all you have on the plate are mounds of yummy masa (corn-based dough) topped with a creamy white sauce. I could have done without the sauce and just ate the masa. It was dense, but had a smooth and appetizing consistency. The tamales were sweet, almost like a dessert. I recommend this dish.
There was only one server and two cooks, so the food took a long time to come out. We waited 15 minutes for our dishes to come out, maybe more. The staff was friendly and spoke English.
They have a TV here that is tuned to a Mexican TV news channel.
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