My roommate and I couldn’t think of any place we desperately wanted to review this week, so we decided to take a drive down Central Avenue and whatever looked the most promising would be the restaurant we reviewed. We drove toward Albany for a bit and didn’t find anything other than diner after diner. After a u-turn, we resumed the search heading away from Albany. We finally settled on Garcia’s Mexican Restaurant.
Upon entering Garcia’s for the first time, you get the feeling that you’re walking into a chain restaurant, with a PA system to call parties to their tables, a large and crowded sports bar, gift certificates and other Garcia’s paraphernalia, and highly stylized signs and menus. We were seated promptly and chips and salsa were brought to our table fairly quickly. We also noticed that they had a large selection of Tequilas and even a few variations of Dos Equis beers on tap behind the bar. Things were looking up, or so we thought.
The menu was also pretty standard for a chain Tex-Mex restaurant, with entrees priced around $8-$13, and a large variety of the usual Tex-Mex food. I picked “Olivia’s Sampler,” which came with pollo fundido, two mini chicken tacos, flautas, and chicken chimichangas. Craig ordered their “Enchiladas de Carnitas,” which are typical enchiladas but with well-seasoned shredded pork. After our order was placed, our food arrived in about 10 minutes, fairly speedy for a restaurant as crowded as it was.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is where this review took a turn for the worse. The food was downright awful and lukewarm to boot—which I still don’t understand because the plate was almost hot enough to burn someone. Of my sampler, two of the four items could be categorized as edible, but the other two didn’t quite meet that mark. The pollo fundido was a pitiful excuse for Tex-Mex food and was overstuffed with celery and what tasted like pickled tomatoes. It was almost like a Tex-Mex pot pie TV dinner, with the chimis being colder and blander with a weird and unpleasant aftertaste. The flautas and mini-tacos were okay, but were heavy on the lettuce and the little chicken inside was woefully devoid of seasoning.
I threw in the towel after half of the pile of “food” I had ordered was on its way to my stomach, but that’s not where the torture ended. Somewhere between my surrender and the arrival of the check, my stomach began to groan in agony. I began to get the increasingly urgent feeling that I’d be meeting the chicken chimichanga again in the very near future. This reviewer had to get home and fast.
A look across the table told me that my roommate Craig was faring about the same. His enchilada was more flavorful than anything on my plate, but was still somewhere below the level of fast-food. He too surrendered early, not because of being full, but because of a lack of appetite—ironically induced by the arrival of his dinner.
While briskly walking back to the car, I prayed that somewhere a truckful of doughnuts had tipped over and every cop car between Latham and Troy was speeding out of the path I was about to blaze like a bat out of nowhere. After flying home, coming to terms with Garcia’s chicken chimis yet again, bonding with my porcelain furniture, and spending the next 18 hours with no appetite for food whatsoever, I began to wonder what I had ever done to Mr. and Mrs. Garcia to deserve such a punishment.
Now, not everything about Garcia’s was horrible. The service was speedy and helpful and the chips and salsa were tasty. Unfortunately, that’s about all I have in the compliment department for this restaurant. Everything from the disco music playing over the loudspeaker, to the TVs behind the bar showing the Weather Channel, to the abundance of random stuff on the wall screamed “chain restaurant,” but the most important part of the equation was missing: respectable food.
Normally, this is the point in the review where I give readers some directions and a phone number to more easily locate the restaurant under inspection, but this week, I think I’ll leave that part out. No one at RPI has wronged me to that point yet. If you’re in the mood for Mexican food, Pancho’s near Wal-Mart is nearby and El Mariachi in downtown Albany is even better if you’ve got the means to get there.
