Dining: Elsi's Restaurant

Elsi's experience gets bigger, better, bolder

By Dale Rice
American-Statesman Restaurant Critic
Web posted: April 6, 2005

Evan Lewis photos for AA-S Top: Elsi's tacos ahogados are a new take on an old favorite. Like chicken flautas, they are fried, but this dish is topped with cabbage, tomato, cheese and a special avocado sauce. Above: Owner Elsi Padilla, above, runs her restaurant with daughter Mirna Lemus. Elsi's Restaurant. 6601 Burnet Road, 454-0747. Rating: Forks up. Price: Cheap.

"I always thought they were pretty plain," she says. "I wanted more spice."

So she and her mother, Elsi Padilla, came up with a spicy avocado sauce to cover the flautas, turning them into tacos ahogados.

The delights ($8.25), one of the Latin American specialties in Elsi's Restaurant, which serves Tex-Mex and Salvadoran dishes, are filled with chicken, fried and topped with cabbage, tomato, avocado sauce and shredded cheese.

Crisp and rolled like flautas, and crowned with the creamy avocado sauce, they are served with rice and beans.

The tacos ahogados are one of the new dishes the mother and daughter added to the menu at Elsi's when it moved to a larger location on Burnet Road.

"They're everybody's new favorite," says Lemus. "They're selling like hotcakes."

The problem with something that good is that a diner might be tempted to have the tacos again and again, skipping other items on Elsi's menu.

That would be a mistake.

The Salvadoran pupusas ($7.49) are delightfully tasty. The gorditas (two round masa cakes, one filled with cheese and the other with pork) were grilled and served with cabbage salad, rice and beans.

The chicken breast in mole sauce ($8.99) was equally appealing. A generous portion of chicken was covered in a rich, smooth, spicy, dark brown mole sauce that Padilla learned to make when she took a cooking class in Michoacan, according to Lemus. The chicken also was served with rice and beans (both the black and charro beans were good).

Like the mole and the avocado sauce, virtually everything served at Elsi's is made in the restaurant.

It is enticing Latin American cooking, which the move to much larger space has not diminished in any way. In fact, those tacos ahogados demonstrate just how well Padilla and Lemus have handled a major expansion.

They've made the new Elsi's even better than the original.