Cancun Mexican Restaurant
324 N. Drake RoadLast weekend was nuts. Our figure skating club hosted the US Figure Skating Midwest Synchronized Skating Sectionals at Wings Event Center.
J was part of the Local Organizing Committee so she spent pretty much all day there between Wednesday and Saturday. The kids love volunteering at our competitions so they also spent pretty much all day there between Wednesday and Saturday.
I….don’t love volunteering. I’m not a people person and I don’t love making small talk with people I don’t know or barely know. J still needed me to volunteer one shift because it’s hard to get parents to volunteer during the week when they should be at work. I already had the day off because L was competing that day so she threw me in for an early morning shift before L’s group went.
Saturday was a super busy day. L finished up her volunteer shift about 10:00 Friday night and wanted to go back for a 7 AM shift Saturday morning. J had gotten home at midnight on Friday and opted to take the noon shift. I took L and one of her friends to the rink and came back home and went to bed.
I got back up as J was getting ready to leave. B was supposed to be done for the weekend but he asked to go back. He didn’t have a shift scheduled but there would be enough for him to do. He had been hanging out with girls from some of the Chicago teams all weekend and wanted to go find them.
That meant, I had the afternoon to myself until B decided he wanted to come home. I had some grocery shopping to do and did some other errands around the house.
I went to Meijer to do my shopping and realized while I was shopping, I was hungry. Instead of getting something to make, I just decided to pick up food on my way home. There’s a new Mexican restaurant I wanted to try.
Cancun Mexican Restaurant opened up on Drake Road just south of West Main Street at the end of last year. The name may sound familiar if you’ve lived in Southwest Michigan for a while. This is the same restaurant that used to be on Red Arrow Highway in Paw Paw. The owners were having a hard time getting staff and decided to move to Kalamazoo when their lease ran out it. It’s also a sister restaurant to Acapulco Mexican Restaurant in Lawrence. Both have been around for a long time and have been hugely successful. This move puts Cancun in to the building that was formerly a Chinese restaurant in a pretty busy shopping area of Kalamazoo.
I put my order in online as I was sitting in the Meijer parking. I kept it simple getting four steak tacos and an order of fries. The bill came out to right around $18 and by the time I made the trip from 9th Street to Drake Road, my food was ready to be picked up.
I walked in to the restaurant to find a counter right at the front door. Cancun is a sit down full service restaurant so you wouldn’t put an order in here if you were dining in but it makes for a convenient pick up spot for people like me who typically do carry out.
A waitress came from the dining room and saw me standing there. She asked if I was the the to-go order. I said yes so she headed to the kitchen to put it together.
I passed because I was by myself and kind of in a hurry but there is a really large dining room if you’re looking for a sit down meal. I don’t think I’ve ever been in this space before. There are other restaurants in this shopping complex that I’ve been too but I don’t really like Chinese food and I can’t recall this space being something else before that I would have been to. I was surprised at just how much room there is.
As I was driving home, J texted me that B was ready to call it a day and I should come get him. I had a car full of groceries and I wanted to eat so I told her he’d have to wait a bit longer.
I started with the fries when I got home. Like I’ve come to expect from Mexican restaurants, the fries aren’t really anything special. They’re unseasoned frozen restaurant fries. I had some BBQ sauce I had just bought at Meijer to dip them in. The only reason I’ve been getting fries from Mexican joints recently is because it’s cheaper and more filling than another taco.
My taco order was four steak tacos Mexican style with cilantro and onion. These tacos were amazing. Each of the pair of corn tortillas was loaded with a super tender steak, crunchy onions and a mound of fresh cilantro. Every bite was effortless. The tortillas were soft and warm and the steak gave no resistance at all. I loved every bite of each of the four tacos….EXCEPT, there was no hot sauce. I was super bummed because these tacos were so amazingly good but the lack of hot sauce brought them down a notch. I didn’t realize it was something I had to ask for. Whenever I order tacos, I just assume a lime (which I got) and hot sauce are part of the order. I’ll know for next time because these tacos were so good. I’ll have to go back for more.
J and I enjoyed our stop the one time we stopped at Cancun when it was in Paw Paw (and also the one time we stopped at Acapulco). I was excited to see the move to Kalamazoo which makes them more accessible to me. I loved the tacos and wanted more. The hot sauce is a minor setback. It would have made the tacos something truly special but even without it, these were top notch street tacos.
SW Michigan Dining 