Cocina Del Barrio

I visited Cocina Del Barrio for brunch this Sunday, and I must say that I was rather disappointed, especially after my wife had great things to say about the downtown location.

My experience echoes those of some of the other reviews here... the food is really nothing special and perhaps overpriced. My Huevos Rancheros were downright bland and the portion size was relatively small. My wife only ate about half of her potato-chorizo hash because it was bland and served lukewarm (I sampled and have to agree with her). The waitress seemed programmed to say everything on the menu was excellent. Unfortunately, it is just not very good.

Never heard of the place and the fiance decided we should try somewhere new. A coworker of his suggested checking it out. So we did..

The restaurant is set up weird. The tables are all jammed together and the bar is huge; overly huge which wastes so much space. They sat us at a high small pub table and I felt like we were practically sitting on the people next to us. It was awkward, like a first uncomfortable date. The decor is not the best either- kind of dark and unusual.

So the menu was easy enough. The waitress said "can I start you off with some fresh guacamole" We said sure. Come to find out, it was $8 plus every time she brought out extra chips it was $1- which is dumb. Ok, we can live with that.

We ordered two tacos a piece. They are tiny. Which is understandable but they were $5 a piece. The food tasted ok. One of the tacos I had didn't have any sort of sauce or salsa. It was just a tortilla with some meat. Oh and a few pieces of raw onion.

We ordered churros for dessert because we were still hungry. You actually got a huge plateful. That was the only thing that wowed us.

I don't know. All-in-all the price was way too high even for Edina. Almost ridiculous for what you got. Maybe try it, but you aren't missing out if you don't. If you want to pay a huge amount of money for hardly any food that is mediocre, then this is the place.

Yeah, this place is not bad - I've been here a couple of times for dinner and it's..fine.  the food is decent and the prices are ok.  Tonight we had a chicken soup, lobster empanadas, squash fritters and churros.  There wasn't anything outstanding about the food, but there was nothing inedible either.  I realized too late that the wonderful churros that I had in my mind were actually the churros from Masa (not Barrio...sigh).

One bonus star because our service was pretty good - they even made our churros after the kitchen had already tossed the chocolate sauce for the night (and so they made our sauce to order.)