Cantu’s Cocina
330 E. Centre AvenueMy last Friday night overtime shift of the fall. And, as has been the case a lot this fall, I was in Portage.
I had a little bit of time between the regular shift and the overtime shift and I wanted to grab dinner before my shift this week. Last week, I did the opposite and grabbed Applebee’s afterwards.
I drove kind of aimlessly down Westnedge but nothing really jumped out at me. I had one more idea a little further south…if it was open.
I pulled in to Sweet Convenience Party Store on the corner of Centre Avenue and Mustang Way right in front of Portage Central High School to find a large blue tent set up in the parking lot. That’s what I was looking for.
Cantu’s Cocina can’t quite be called a “food truck” but they are a mobile food operation who has set up a semi permanent business in the parking lot of Sweet Convenience. They use a couple of pop up tents and have them tied together with blue tarp walls. Their whole operation is mobile with cooking taking place on a Blackstone and the rest of the food being kept warm in slow cookers on tables behind the cook.
The pop up Mexican joint was pretty busy on this Friday night. The parking lot was overflowing at the Convenience store. I headed inside first to grab a couple of Pepsi’s then headed back out to the tent to look over the menu that is written on a dry erase board sitting on the ground next to one of the poles. It’s a little tough to read at night but I saw what I was looking for right away.
There isn’t really an order area. A guy came out of the tent with a note pad and started taking orders once he finished up packing someone else’s order up. I kept mine simple with my usual. Four steak tacos with cilantro and onion. The tacos are $4 each so by the time I added a tip, my total was pretty close to $20.
It took about ten minutes for my order to be put together. You can watch the whole thing happen right in front of you. Like I mentioned, things had gotten pretty buys about the time I got there so they were working on several orders at once. It still didn’t take very long for my four tacos to be boxed up and handed to me. There’s no place to eat there and since the parking lot was packed, I decided to give up my space and head over to my job site to eat.
The tacos were pretty simple Mexican street tacos except instead of the usual two corn tortilla shells, these tacos only had one. That made them a little bit more messy than tacos with two because the single taco didn’t always hold up to the filling inside. I kind of wrapped the taco around itself like a little taquito and that helped keep things together.
The tacos were filled about halfway with a very tender, flavorful grilled steak then topped off with the usual cilantro and onion combination. There was no hot sauce in the container and I didn’t think to ask. That’s on me. I just always assume there’s hot sauce included with tacos. I was a little disappointed by that but the tacos were tasty without it. Hot sauce would have just upped the experience a bit.
Cantu’s Cocina is an interesting concept. They do everything a good taco truck does but by having this space at Sweet Convenience, you always know where you’ll be able to find them. I think I made a mistake by not going for the Birria Tacos though. I watched a couple of those get made and almost put in another order. I was happy with what I got though and it got me through another late night shift at work.
SW Michigan Dining 