El Sabor - Mexican Restaurant — Restaurant in Melbourne

This will be fairly detailed as I hope to help others in their decisions. In short, if your familiarity with mexican food is old el paso and maybe taco bill, you will probably enjoy this food. In fact, it will probably be fascinating, because of the more traditional american influence. However, if your familiarity goes beyond that, this will be a disappointment. Quite a severe one. Firstly, the tortillas are not good. This is obviously because they are trying to keep the food halal. Sadly, it is not possible to make good white tortillas without using pork fat. The result is a reasonable texture, but none of the flaky fluff of a proper tortilla. Further, the tortillas lack the distinctive flavor of proper ones. Secondly, there is no salsa roja (ie the classic fresh salsa using tomatos, corriander and onions etc). This is a missed opportunity and honestly puts this resteraunt below typically low brow mexican places. Thirdly, there is a general lack of flavor to the food. This is because they absolutely drown everything in mozeralla, leading to a very heavy feel. Also, whilst the menu talks about some special marination, I call bull*t. It is indistinguishable. Unfortunately, the presentation of the fajita meat with the cheese melted on top appeared uncomfortable like dog food that you get at ALDI, no malliard reaction, no color. Likewise, the distinctive corriander and acidity typical of mexican food is entirely lack.

Positives Presentation is very nice generally Chicken wings were good Location and...

EDIT. Went back 07/06/25 although we had been back once since the first review below ( i think ) & people booked in and at first i wasn't all that confidant that is was going to be decent. I think there are new owners as well. But to my joy the food was still great and the service was pretty good to be honest. I'd give a 4.5 for the food, i think the tacos aren't what they once were though. Only thing really that was a bit different was that there now isn't any interaction between the hosts and the patrons, its just take order and go type of thing. Which yes things change, but that was one of the great things about El Sabor in the past. We were seated and out in around just over an hour.

We had a great meal 18 /02/17.We celebrated our anniversary and really couldn't have asked for a nicer experience. Soft shell Tacos 10/10, nachos on the share menu with the black bean and green sauce was on par if not better than nachos we had not long ago 20 miles out from the Mexican border in California. Enchiladas were great and the tamales were also. Only thing that stopped me from giving them a five was that at times the service was slow, the food was 5/5 in quality. We got a couple of shots on the house due to our celebration and one between us later on. Would definitely go back again, the staff friendliness and food was great, plus plenty of parking...

Me and my partner love this Mexican restaurant, used to be our a local a year ago which we would frequently go to. However since moving to the suburbs we hadn’t been back until yesterday. The food is still amazing, we really enjoyed our meal. Also it was get value for money.

This time we were seated downstairs which has a much better atmosphere than upstairs, the only annoying part was that the speaker that was playing music kept stopping and starting every couple of minutes.

The service is okay, the girls are polite however not very tentative. This has been the case for all of our visits here, as a hospitality worker myself, I feel like they could try more to connect with customers. A group of 6 were dining across from us and left before we got our food. Their table sat covered in dirty plates and glasses for around 20 minutes despite it not being that busy and also the staff walked past the table many times and just ignored the mess. Lastly I made a booking online, which I don’t think the waitress even knew about.

I don’t want this to be a negative review, because I genuinely really like this place, just some points which I think could use some improvement.

We will be back in the future. The beef burrito bowl is my...