TAQUERIA EL TAPATIO
It’s not hard to find good food,” Soledad Leon says, sitting in a booth in Taqueria El Tapatio, 5630 W. Amarillo Blvd. “But it’s hard to find good service. It’s hard to find a family business where you feel like you’re eating at home with all the love and everything.”
It’s early afternoon on a Friday and the spacious restaurant—which used to be an Applebee’s—is surprisingly busy. The bar is full. Soccer matches fill the TV screens. Members of Leon’s family are working diligently at the bar, in the kitchen, and shuffling dishes to and from booths.
Don’t let the vaguely familiar neighborhood-bar-and-grill layout fool you: El Tapatio is a true family restaurant, in all the best ways.
“This is a family business,” Soledad says. She manages this location. Her brother-in-law manages Taqueria El Tapatio at 3410 S. Coulter St. Other locations in Dumas and Canyon are also part of the family-owned operation. “It’s brother-in-law, nephews, sister-in-law, cousins. It’s a big family.”
The concept started with brothers Arturo, Jose and Alvaro Plascencia. The family history starts in Guadalajara, a city in western Mexico. (“Tapatio” is a colloquial term referring to people from that region.) After coming to the United States, most of the family ended up operating restaurants in San Antonio, where the intense competition birthed a desire to take their food further north.
“It’s a Mexican place on every corner, every block, like everywhere,” Soledad says of San Antonio.
They set their eyes on the Texas Panhandle, where Mexican food certainly isn’t a novelty but where the competition was much less spicy. In 2022, the family invited Soledad to help open the new Amarillo location. She was living in San Marcos at the time, where she worked in a cozy family restaurant. “It was just 12 tables,” she says. “It was little.”
There was nothing “little” about the former Applebee’s. Converting the footprint of a national chain into its current atmosphere was a heavy lift—“Oh, my goodness, it was messy and old,” she says of the building—but the new restaurant concept opened in the fall of 2022.
El Tapatio straddles the line between authentic Mexican flavors and Tex-Mex, with a menu reflecting that diversity. For instance, customers can order abujas, a rib-eye steak topped with tender nopalitos (strips of prickly pear cactus pads). Or they can stick with something more familiar, like chicken fajitas.
Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle certainly weren’t strangers to Tex-Mex or south-of-the-border flavors, of course. But the family strategically focused on introducing their hybrid menu to west Amarillo, supported by a commitment to customer service and true family atmosphere. “If you go to the other places and then you come here, you feel it,” Leon says. “It’s the way you feel when you cross the door. Everyone says hi to you. We all try to work hard to be on point.”
She knows that’s the environment customers have encountered at the other El Tapatio locations, so she’s dedicated to making sure they’re treated as well at her restaurant as they are on Coulter, or in Dumas or Canyon. “People have high expectations,” she adds.
The dishes definitely meet those expectations, from the savory quesabirrias to the sizzling parrillada, a feast of grilled meats including ribeye steak, chicken fajita strips and chorizo. Wash it down with any one of the bar’s attention-getting cocktails, including the paloma-like cantarito—served in a distinctive, unglazed clay cup—or the enormous Tapatio margarita.
5630 W. Amarillo Blvd.
806.803.3220
tapatiotx.com
