MasMais Taqueria 🌮 — Restaurant in Amsterdam

I’m sorry but 4.7 stars really? I really wanted to leave a rationale and factual review but all the glowing reviews just enraged me. The taste is surprisingly bland and the quality just does not cut it.

So let me try - mezcal Paloma, no mezcal whatsoever. It could’ve been a virgin cocktail to me. There’s no smoke or any trace of a liquor.

Carnitas - the meat looked like chicken chunks. Carnitas are braised and slow cooked for hours, and seasoned as well. this was clearly not any of those things.

I guess it was slow cooked only because each plate took 30 minutes to come out, never all together, with one person eating at a time.

The guacamole with tostadas tasted store bought, under seasoned (literally salt goes a long way) and missing signature flavors like cilantro, tomato and white onion, which also don’t show up in any other dishes. It also came with two fried tortillas (that’s the tostada) for 7 euro, just seemed egregious.

The tortillas were okay, but tortillas are a vessel for the ingredients. All of it needs to come together to be the authentic Mexican food. Cool you have 100% corn tortillas, that’s the expectation for every Mexican taco. That’s not a selling point. Get the ingredients right and then once you’ve mastered that, then you can get creative.

The black bean brownie, we were excited for because it’s hard to ruin. We stood corrected today - this one was dry, crumbly and completely missed the mark.

It’s sad because with a name like MasMais, there so much opportunity to incorporate corn. From elotes, to blue corn, to tamales - Mexico is ripe with great corn dishes but instead we get to have popcorn served sprinkled on top of our brownie.

Our large group of latinas left still hungry, a little poorer and disappointed, as usual, at Amsterdam’s take on...

An excellent place to eat with a good range of taco options to pick from. This is a very high 4 star rating.

We had the three vegetarian options: pumpkin, beans and mushroom. They were all very good. The pumpkin and mushroom had good savoury flavours and were tasty but the flavour profile was a bit muted. The stand out was the refried beans taco (which I would rate 5 stars). It was so fresh and just the perfect combination of South American fresh flavours. Definitely the taco to finish on as a refreshing palate cleanser. The tacos seem to come in two sizes, with the smaller sized dishes coming in tacos about the size of your open palm.

Note: for people who don’t like coriander, tell the staff members this when you order because some garnishes and ingredients in the tacos are heavy on the coriander.

As a plus, we were pleasantly surprised when we were told that Thursday was 5 euro margarita nights.

The staff were exceptional. They were super friendly and so eager to give us some advice on things to do during our visit to Amsterdam. Maximum stars for service.

Overall a great experience and a place I...

Drinks were my favorite part of the menu, we ordered the hibiscus margherita and the Paloma.

For an appetizer we shared the chilaquiles, normally this is a breakfast dish so I was surprised to see it on the dinner menu. I found the portions rather small, and no protein came with it.

Their tacos entrees had 2 taco per order. We split the three meat tacos, Turkey, carnitas, and chorizo. I felt that there could have been more meat on the tacos. I felt that the portions were a bit disappointing.

The desert was interesting, a black bean brownie with whipped cream and popcorn.

Overall an interesting dinner. Having lived half my life in LA and visiting Mexico every year for the tacos, im quite familiar with what Mexican food is supposed to bring in terms of flavor. Just wasn’t doing it for me to be honest. It’s hard to find good Mexican in Amsterdam, it continues to be this way...