Restaurant El Michoacano, Santa Rosa
Hubby and I ventured out to try to find some tacos that rival El Grullense's in RWC. (RWC is my hometown, and the Woodside Rd. El Grullense has just about my idea of the perfect taco.)
We ended up at El Michoancano.
He ordered the #5, 2 cheese enchiladas with red sauce, 2 cheese enchiladas with green sauce. It came with rice (eh) and beans (LARDY and delicious). The enchiladas were delicious. The red sauce wasn't too vinegary, or too muddy flavored as I have found in a lot of other restaurants. It was well balanced with the amount of cheese and homemade corn tortillas. The green sauce was fantastic, the star, I think. It was spicy (it was also served as a side to the fresh and hot chips that were served), but not too spicy. The cheese and corn tortilla melded nicely with the spicy green sauce. As noted above the rice was just ok. Emaciated peas and corn mixed in. It was fine... The beans were creamy and practically white there was so much lard in them. YUM. The fresh chips were great dipped in to them.
I had 2 tacos, al pastor and carnitas. The al pastor was better for me. The carnitas had a nice flavor, but was drier chunks, not the lovely tender pulled version. The al pastor was lovely. Fatty, but no gristle, well flavored meat. Mmmmmm! These were both on one handmade corn tortilla (as opposed to El Grullense's 2) and were larger than El Grullenses. Both had chopped onions and cilantro, but no salsa. These tacos were not QUITE as good as El Grullense, BUT they were a better value ($2.25) than a lot of the more burrito-centric places that I have found in Santa Rosa. (El Grullense's are $1.50.)
Nice beer selection, 3 flavors of horchata, and michelada on the menu.
All in all a great trip and a great new find. They had some wonderful looking mariscos as well on the menu. (A little girl next to us was grubbing on some deep fried shrimp that looked like they were out of a commercial--in a good way.) Will definitely be going back. Will have to check it out at night...see what the crowd is like. It is very clean and well lit also, so the crowd shouldn't be a problem.
JB
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Restaurant El Michoacano
500 Sebastopol Rd, Santa Rosa, CA 95407
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RWCFoodie
Aug 2, 2009 03:34 PM
I have a soft spot in my heart for El Michoacano... I had originally read Eat Nopal's post and then DH and I had the pleasure of meeting him for lunch there just before he moved to Hawaii. The food was outstanding. Lots of interesting and not just run-of-the-mill food. I try to convince DH to pull off the freeway every time we happen to be running back and forth on 101 but don't always succeed...
If you haven't seen his post, check this out:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/545216
