Regular Joe's Guide

Locations: DFW (4); Houston / College Station / Beaumont (19); Austin (5); San Antonio (3). For our NE Tarrant readers, it appears Alliance would be the closest. HQ: Houston (founded: 1983) Alrighty - Mr. Music is on the scoreboard for 2025! Looks like he's been visiting a chain that owns tex-mex.com. Let's see how his experiences went. --- I went out to McKinney to meet my brother, my sister-in-law and their son's family for some disc golf. After a great, long round in the woods we were all famished! My nephew and his wife, seemingly in unison said "have you ever been to Lupe Tortilla?" "We gotta go!". They explained that their flour and corn tortillas were freshly made there and they had fantastic fajitas and lots of other Tex-Mex dishes. They had me at fresh made corn tortillas! You don't get those everywhere! I figured this must be some cool mom/pop place; my favorite! I followed them to the restaurant, which was on Central Expressway in Allen....

...only a few years too late... You can save time on the narrative below and go here:  https://www.instagram.com/regularjoesguide There was a time when the RJG was ahead of the curve, especially when one considers that we were the single most popular restaurant blog in Dallas-Fort Worth according to Urbanspoon. Yea, Urbanspoon. Remember them? They were a blog friendly site that helped promote local restaurants via those blogs. We ended up designing this blog around that site, which took me some years to unwind. In 2015, an Indian firm called Zomato bought the site and subsequently destroyed it because they didn't take the time to understand why it was popular. They took away crowd sourcing, and everyone eventually moved to Google Reviews and Yelp. Both platforms are decidedly anti-blog. We've added reviews to Google and TripAdvisor, but it hasn't lead to much activity here. Why do I prefer the blog platform over the others? Because I can control the content and keep posts r...

First visit: Jan 2025 (S. Academy @ Hancock) Locations: Colorado Springs (2); Fountain; Pueblo; Pueblo West; Alamosa; Raton-NM (dba Alfonso's) And the RJG notches the first new-to-us restaurant for 2025! I've been circling El Super Taco for many years, but just never got around to trying them. This particular location sits in the same parking lot as a thrift store I often frequent. So on this very cold but sunny Friday at lunch, I made my first visit, as I was already down this way. I believe this to be their debut restaurant and it looks to be an old Taco Bell that they repurposed to good use.  Walk in and order at the counter (they have a popular drive through as well). I asked for a pollo asado taco, even though it wasn't on the menu. I passed on the sour cream, and substituted cheese. I also grabbed a ground beef taco sans tomato. Paid up with a credit card and they ask for the unearned tip, which they didn't get. No matter, as the ladies at the counter were very ni...