Gerrit D./Yelp / Reva B./Yelp
Mexican and Tex-Mex food is everywhere in America. Fast-food and sit-down chain restaurants serving Mexican food dot the country, and they run the gamut in quality. Some will provide a delicious and fun meal for your family, while others will disappoint you with bland burritos, watery salsa, and brown guacamole.
Here are the Mexican and Tex-Mex chains you might want to stay away from, in no particular order.
Chuy’s used to get a lot of hype, but things have gone downhill in the last decade, especially since the pandemic. The menu shrank, and the quality of the food dropped. Customers complain about tough, dry meat, stale chips, and runny queso all the time. “I’ll put them on my list of post pandemic businesses that have gone into the toilet,” said u/elibutton in a review posted on Reddit.
There is one thing that Uncle Julio’s does well: paper thin, fresh tortilla chips. Unfortunately, if you want something to dip them in, you’ll have to settle for some incredibly flavorless salsa. Online reviews often talk about how overpriced it is, and a Redditor who claims to be a former employee talks about how the chain appears to be cutting a lot of corners now with fewer frequent specials and reducing its fresh ingredients.
Remember when Chipotle was the place to get a burrito? It was seriously hype, pretty delicious, and known for burritos as big as your head. Well, the chain has absolutely lost its luster in the last few years, and customers are disenchanted with the brand. The prices are sky high, and people take to social media to post photos of their hilariously tiny burritos now. We’re not sure there’s any coming back from Chipotle’s burrito size scandal.
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Sure, Taco Bell is probably the most popular Mexican fast food in America, but we’re not convinced it’s because of anything but convenience due to the sheer number of locations. Prices have been going steadily up and deals have been getting worse, which is hard to swallow when the chances of your order being screwed up seem to be about 50/50. Unless you’re the late-night crowd type, just skip the Bell.
Imagine being a Moe’s employee and having to shout (and hear!) “Welcome to Moe’s!” hundreds of times every day when anyone walks in the door. Shudder. Beyond the uncomfortable entrance, many people find that the rice is undercooked and hard, and the food “ tastes exactly the same… which isn’t tasting like much at all.” And like the chain it’s emulating, Chipotle, the portion sizes seem to be shrinking.
On the Border used to be known for large portions, but that isn’t really the case anymore. So while you used to at least get your money’s worth, now the mediocre food feels more like a ripoff. The chain is big on “mesquite wood flavor,” but really it just makes everything taste vaguely like campfire smoke. According to many reviewers, the fajitas are particularly small portions and often have undercooked vegetables. And as one Redditor so eloquently put it: “The tap water had more spice and flavor than the salsa.”
Qdoba is a Chipotle clone, but somehow all of the food tastes like the flavor has been sucked out of it. Plus, every tortilla, every bowl, every burrito — everything is just wet and soggy. The only saving grace is the fact that the prices include guacamole and queso, so the portions are big. But this is absolutely a case of quantity over quality, and that’s a bummer.
We don’t usually think of fast food when we want to get fresh fish, so Rubio’s, which specializes in fish tacos, is already kind of a head-scratcher. Portion sizes are shrinking, according to customers; they also believe the quality has gone down in recent years. The chain has filed for bankruptcy twice and closed 48 locations this year , so they’re clearly struggling for customers. According to one Redditor, Rubio’s is “only worth going if you got coupons or a coupon code.”
