RESTAURANT REVIEW: Little Rock taco spot tiny, tasty, timely

When it comes to fittingly reflecting its menu, Taco Beer Burrito is probably the town's most accurately named dining establishment.

Plus some appetizers, a couple of desserts and a short list of fruit-dominated margaritas, that's pretty much the entire bill of fare: tacos, burritos and brews, both from parent Blue Canoe Brewing Co., for which this is essentially a taproom, and some predominantly Mexican-made bottled cerveza.

Taco Beer Burrito is part of a Third Street strip of new small-scale eateries that includes Skye's Little Bistro and Andina Cafe's new evening-serving Tuf Nut Tap Room.

To call this place cozy is an understatement. There's seating for perhaps 40, at three tables arranged along a long, low pew, with seating at the bar, along the window and around a big old wine barrel, in slotted aluminum chairs (low at the tables) and bar stools (everywhere else).

A festive skull icon that is also the menu logo decorates the back wall of the bar, amid paper lanterns, a pastel green air duct and a couple of big-screen TVs. Elsewhere, the decor is mostly weathered red brick and white subway tile. The music is an eclectic mix; add a few human voices rebounding off the brick and tile and the place can get pretty loud even when it's not crowded. Four antique doors frame a complicated hydrant device connecting to a series of overhead pipes that must include the sprinkler system, and which reduces the floor space a small but significant amount.

If you're in a some way mobility-challenged, you won't be able to negotiate the two steps up to the front door and the two steps inside the front door; wheelchair access is through the next-door Tuf Nut building main entry and short elevator trip into a maze of back-of-house corridors.

Mexican decor and even Mexican beers don't quite mean Mexican food. Here it's more Tex-Mex; the proof, perhaps, is in that Taco Beer Burrito doesn't offer Mexican hot sauces -- on the bar and on each table is only a biggish bottle of Tabasco, made in Louisiana, and Sriracha, a red chili sauce of Asian origin manufactured in California.

The Street Tacos (three for $10.50) come on slightly thick, slightly chewy flour tortillas, the meat topped with shredded lettuce, shredded cheese and tomatoes, with a metal "thimble" of black beans and pile of yellow rice. Burritos (also $10.50) are more on the short/squat side, a flour tortilla wrapped around rice, beans, shredded cheese, queso, lettuce and tomatoes with a ramekin of salsa and a small scoop of sour cream.

Once you've chosen between them, you must make a meat choice: Shredded Chuck Beef and Shredded Pork Butt, both slow-cooked in the brewery's Whittler Milk Stout, and Shredded Chicken, slow-cooked in Blue Canoe's Lazy River Table Ale.

We preferred the two kinds of tacos we tried to the one kind of burrito. And we preferred the richer-tasting Shredded Chuck Beef Street Tacos to the Shredded Pork Butt Street Tacos. In both cases, the accompanying lime slice helped (expecting customers to cover three tacos with one small lime wedge is kind of miserly, though); so did adding a ribbon of Sriracha per taco, which worked better than the Tabasco.

Rice dominates the Shredded Chuck Beef Burrito; that was a drawback for us. It came out of the kitchen bare; it would have benefited from a top layer of salsa or queso (they're available as 50-cent add-ons along with fresh jalapenos, onions, salsa, sour cream and Mamaw's Green Sauce). The tasty shredded beef didn't provide enough flavor, and if there was interior queso we neither "felt" nor tasted it.

As we have encountered elsewhere, the richly flavored beans ($2.50 a la carte), "slow cooked with garlic and tomatoes," according to the menu (and maybe with a dash of beer thrown in) were the best thing we had on any plate. We also gobbled up pretty much all of our rice (also $2.50 a la carte), redolent of curry.

We can also recommend Taco Beer Burrito's chunky Guac ($6.95), with distinct and enjoyable garlic and lime flavors, and the Queso Ole (also $6.95), a rich, yellow cheese dip blended with green chiles and garnished with two very thin slices of fresh jalapeno. The plentiful and mostly whole commercial chips are thick enough to stand up to both dips, but if you're on a low-sodium diet, you'd better bring your own -- as these are lightly dusted with enough salt to affect the overall flavor.

There are four Blue Canoe brews listed on the menu, with a second, six-bottle stand-up list on the table, five Mexican beers and a hard ginger ale that went very well with both burritos and tacos. So did the Lazy River Table Ale, refreshingly light but still noticeably hoppy. Both lists include the alcohol percentage to help patrons calculate how many they can comfortably and safely consume.

Service was excellent across all visits, all when the restaurant wasn't particularly busy. Food, as is typical of Mexican and Tex-Mex, comes out of the kitchen blazingly fast, so that our tacos were on the table while we were just getting into our guac and queso.

Weekend on 06/23/2016