LifeGamesNoms: Casa Mexicana

The scene: a Saturday night, a much needed catch up with friends and a lot of events and dramas to update everyone on, so what do we end up eating? Mexican of course! Corn chips, tacos and beer were on the cards when we descended upon this Northbridge restaurant last Saturday evening.

Casa Mexicana - El Campo was one of those places I've walked by and wanted to try, the furnishings seems pretty basic/casual, white plastic chairs, a red light by one wall and loud background noise, of people talking increasingly louder to be heard. This isn't your intimate dinner place but definitely suitable for a casual night out.

The menu is fairly compact and we were attended by a friendly Argentinian waitress, with genuine concern if the food we got wasn't good (but not like she could've comp'd anything free though) we proceeded to order a variety of menu items to get a good tasting of what this restaurant had to offer.

Started with a set of four starters - the house guacamole, a corn esquites, refried black beans and a small pork roll which I've forgotten the name of it already (it was that memorable?)

Anyhow the entree dips were served with corn chips which they graciously refilled upon request (I didn't notice being charged which was nice)

We then ordered some sopes, these are corn dough bases topped with a variety of toppings (think your typical beef / pork pulled meat toppings with capsicum onion tomato based salsas). For $10 these seemed a bit more filling than the entrees and packed a good punch of flavour. Size wise they were slightly smaller than the tacos, probably the size of a person's palm. They did come with two sopes per serve which was a plus

We skipped the quesadilla round and moved onto ordering a variety of tacos. At $7-10 per taco it isnt what you'd call good value with each taco consisting of a soft flour taco with good flavoured toppings. We had about 3 tacos per son and with the beers were just OK on the filled stomach meter. Taco varieties ranged from chicken, beef and pork tacos with a vegetarian cactus taco I didn't get to try unfortunately). All in all the flavours were fine, typical flavour combinations were used eg. Pork carnitas were paired with some apple cubes, beef had slivers of capsicum. I'll let the photos attempt to speak for themselves.

All in all it wasn't too bad (one plus the food arrived quickly and together!!) but not really a place to go back to in a hurry, about on par with La Cholitas I reckon. My search for new Mexican restaurants continues....
(Apologies for the really abysmal photo quality this time round.... dim lightning really hurts the quality)