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From left: elote, California fries and street tacos
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Skinny margarita
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Customers enjoying La Hacienda’s outside seating at Stony Point Fashion Park
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Street tacos
At its core, street food doesn’t require a culinary degree to make, explain or appreciate. It’s fun, easy to eat and inexpensive. Street food is a party, whether in your mouth or as part of a celebration.
Tacos, elote, sopes, tortas — now we’re talking Mexican-style street food. Add overstuffed burritos filled with fantastical combinations of meat, seafood and junk food, and you’re tasting Mexi-Cali street food, exactly what La Hacienda Street Food & Tequila at Stony Point Fashion Park aims to dish out, along with dozens of tequilas from a full-service dining room.
La Hacienda Street Food & Tequila opened last November, taking over the former Chipotle space. Anytime a Chipotle, or any chain restaurant for that matter, bites it in favor of a less cookie-cutter concept, my stomach grows two sizes.
The eatery is the fourth restaurant owned by the Ramos family, whose roots go back to Jalisco, Mexico, but their first one serving Richmond. The Ramoses also own Taqueria La Hacienda, a bustling taco joint in Chesapeake, along with two La Hacienda Fresh Mexican Grill restaurants.
A brother-and-sister team, California natives Cynthia and Louis Ramos run the show at the Stony Point La Hacienda, leaning on their parents’ core menu but adding their own Instagrammable additions. Facebook is your best bet for finding out what’s new and on special.
Cynthia makes frequent trips to the Golden State and injects West Coast inspiration into the menu. The open, sun-ripened dining room is painted vivid orange, and like a piece of fruit, it’s begging to be bitten, but it’s Cynthia’s desserts that you’ll want to wrap your mouth around. In April, frosty frosé and a concha (Mexican sweet bread that resembles a seashell) ice cream sandwich were indulgences that bookended a tableau of kids running through the splash pad just outside the front door.
Chips and salsa may be complimentary, but they are certainly not an afterthought. The salsa is made the same way it is at the Ramoses’ other outposts: thick, roasted, smoky and sweet, with tomatillo and tomato. This salsa is the restaurant’s heartbeat, if you want to know its heartstopper, then order the loaded, crispy California fries heaped with succulent asada.
This is not the case with the fajitas, which were overcooked to the point where the proteins appeared and tasted parched. Another disappointment was the sopes, fried corn disks topped with refried beans, that came out hockey-puck hard rather than pillowy. These were some of the low points during several meals.
La Hacienda Street Food doesn’t have an executive chef steering; the recipes come from the Ramoses and are executed by a culinary team. Sometimes, as I believe with my visits, this works to their disadvantage because the person in charge of the kitchen wants to do things their way, and may change a recipe or cooking time, or simply isn’t as personally vested as the owners are in what’s sent out of the kitchen. The food should have been better and I think it probably would have been better with a different taskmaster in the kitchen. The woulda-coulda sentiment also applies to the service. Though affable, it was at times overtasked, resulting in a long wait for mixed drinks and large trays of hot food being put down on empty tables rather than delivered, so that the servers could first seat tables.
The elote (roasted corn on the cob, usually served on a skewer so it’s less messy to eat) had all the ingredients to produce mouthwatering flavors: crunchy corn, decadent mayo, queso fresco and grassy cilantro, but it was missing a critical step: The corn had not been charred after it was boiled, greatly reducing its savor and leaving the diner with a bland offering.
The street tacos however, were a highlight. The naked pork, steak and shrimp tacos were moist and tender — all more delicately flavored than the heavier spiced, cumin-laced tacos I’ve eaten at restaurants along Midlothian Turnpike. I would have relished sliced radish and cucumber, or pickled veggies, in addition to the chopped onion and cilantro, but those extras were not to be had.
The restaurant’s specialty is East Los Angeles-style burritos: big, bold and stuffed with a combination of temptations, such as guacamole and fries in the carne asada, then spread across a flour tortilla blanketed with fried mozzarella. Then there’s the Mac Daddy burrito filled with, you guessed it, macaroni and cheese. The surf-and-turf burrito rolls grilled shrimp and steak with guacamole and is topped with a drippy American cheese sauce. Though heavy-sounding, it was much lighter than a typical ground-beef burrito doused with sour cream and red sauce, a choice the restaurant doesn’t offer because ground beef isn’t a West Coast thing.
La Hacienda Street Food is affordable, makes a mean fresh margarita and is run by some really nice folks. But after visits in both April and May, my fear is that the atmosphere and creative specials are not enough to overshadow the kitchen’s pitfalls and lack of culinary oversight. It’s a gift to have such a place at Stony Point, and one I hope that diners can seek out and unwrap once a consistent kitchen team takes charge.
2 out of 5 stars
La Hacienda Street Food & Tequila
Stony Point Fashion Park
804-767-2917
$5 to $18
