Chavo’s Mexican Restaurant

Yelp! Average: Rating:

Chavo’s Mexican Restaurant is an ‘assembly-line’ style taqueria located on the corner of 4th & Bryant in South of Market. Most recently, they’ve endured months of the Fourth Street Central Subway Construction Project, so check them out and throw them some of your business if you’re in the neighborhood.

LiveSOMA.com’s Review:

This is the first restaurant that I saw when I arrived in San Francisco after a weeklong relocation from New York City.  I love Mexican food (and more importantly, burritos) probably more than any other type of cuisine on the planet!  So after a long and treacherous drive, all I could think about was that burrito shack that I passed on the way into town.

At first glance, Chavo’s barely looks like it’s open.  With a chain-link fence surrounding the property, I would hardly call this an ideal ‘first date’ location, unless it’s predetermined that you both love cheap, authentic Mexican food!  I guess I would call this more of a ‘quick lunch’ or ‘frat boy’ eatery.  With that said, it was the first place I ate with my newlywed wife as a new resident of California.

When we walked in, I noticed there were no customers.  Zero.  I turned to my wife and said something corny, like “I guess we didn’t have to make a reservation” (bu-dum-bum).  Stepping up to the counter to order, I noticed that they have Taco Truck-like pricing, which is fantastic!  I ordered a Chicken Burrito with a side of chips and salsa.  The wife ordered two Chicken Tacos because “$4 and change seemed too cheap for a large portion.”  The woman behind the counter warned her that they were pretty large. Suffice to say that we both had leftovers.

The ordering process reminded me of Qdoba or Chipotle (great website, by the way).  You order what you want, and they make it for you off an assembly line with choice of meat, beans and condiments.  The only difference is that the ingredients seemed more authentic (and far less chemically processed) than anything at those American burrito joints.  Both meals were extremely filling, and worth at least what we paid.   The bill for two came to just over $20, and that included one of the coldest Dos Equis Amber’s I’ve ever had.  Not to be cliche, but this is one establishment where the ‘don’t judge a book by it’s cover’ metaphor applies.  They’re also a WiFi Hotspot, so you can do your work, or talk to your peeps while scarfing down a burrito!