Tienda Y Taqueria Del Ray
105 Sheldon StreetYou know how I have to stop at every taco place I pass…..right?
I was in Dowagiac a couple of days last week. The first day we didn’t really have time for lunch but on day 2, there was a little more down time. I never pass up a “taco” sign when I see it and I saw one on our way in to town.
Tienda Y Taqueria Del Ray is on the corner of Sheldon Street and North Front Street (US-51) on the north side of Dowagiac. The small grocery store and restaurant isn’t much more than a metal building that sits back off the busy highway. At one point, it was a gym, but there’s a big gap in the Google Street view to know what happened in between.
There’s a lot of empty space in this building the way it’s set up now. When you first walk in, there’s a grocery section with a lot of commonly used ingredients used in Mexican cooking that aren’t common to find in your local hyper markets.
The back of the building is the restaurant portion. There’s really not much in this area. It’s just an order counter and a lot of wide open space. There are no tables so there’s no place to dine-in. There’s a warming case on one side of the counter with ready to go tamales and there’s a drink cooler along one wall.
There’s also a pastry case full of tasty looking sweets along the back wall.
They have an online ordering website that seems to have quite a few more options than what I saw on the printed menu sitting on the counter. I only wanted tacos anyway so all that other stuff didn’t really matter.
I put in an order for five steak tacos on corn tortillas with cilantro and onion. It took about five minutes or so for my order to be wrapped up in foil and handed over. There was no place to eat in the restaurant anyway so I headed outside and just ate on the hood of my car.
Tacos are pretty hard to screw up so it’s rare for me to say anything other than how much I like tacos. That’s not gonna change here. The tacos were good. They only gave me a small thing of hot sauce but I stretched over all five tacos. The double corn tortillas were filled to the point of overflowing with a meat that was super tender and didn’t really need the hot sauce but benefited from the added heat.
I love it when I pull in to a town and there’s a small taco joint. Tacos are seriously the perfect food. They’re quick to make but super filling. Taqueria Del Rey is everything I look for in a taqueria. Delicious food fast.
SW Michigan Dining 