El Güero — Restaurant in Braga

With a 4.8 rating one would have expected at least half-decent food; unfortunately that was not the case. Mexican cuisine is simply not known or understood in Portugal, and El Guero is no exception. I spent a lifetime in the San Francisco Bay Area eating great Mexican food and have eaten remarkable food on the west coast of Mexico as well.

There was simply not a single element of the cuisine that was done right. I could probably spend a hour detailing the culinary failures, but I will only comment on a couple of things.

We had their tacos, a burrito, ribs, and some sides. First, the corn tortillas. Dry, tasteless and cooked precisely wrong. You either need to steam them or throw them on a hot griddle for a few seconds or at worst deep fry them to get them crispy. These were poor quality and stale to begin with and then were subjected to some bad-tasting cooking oil and fried until they were neither crunchy nor soft. And that was for TACOS!

The pork in the taco was skimpy, dry and tough and had a tiny smear of bottled barbeque sauce. This is Portugal and they know how to cook pork. But not here.

The nachos were simply the worst ever. Store bought chips with a runny orange cheesey sauce at the bottom of the bowl and a tiny dollop of tasteless browned guacamole.

The tiny bit of "hot sauce" in a small bowl had exactly zero heat and tasted like tiny slivers of red and green bell peppers and a LOT of oil.

I have had routinely bad Mexican food in Portugal so I should have known better than to get my hopes up.

If I were the executive chef (which I have been before), I would start by burning every recipe and the ugly red mini-sombreros on the wall.

Not knowing a cuisine is no excuse. If you can use Google you can find recipes for great Mexican food. But if you simply don't care about flavor or have no taste, you end up with food like this.

Their ratings must come from people who have no clue and are happy to have something that...

It started with a good, filling quesadilla and ended with the worst Tacos I ever had. We order Pork tacos but we weren't sure what arrived at the table because it was dry white meat (like a badly cooked chicken breast) that doesn't taste of pork, but the waiter kept saying "Oh yeah, that's pork" and we thought we're crazy and bit our tongues and continued eating. Pretty dure that was chicken. (You can feel stale unchewable taco shells from the photos attached.)

The Taco shells were unchewable. 1 order missing. The same drink order comes at a different standard (1st Margarita comes with salt on the rim and only the drink, 2nd glass comes with no salt on the rim and a piece of passion fruit floating on the drink).

Our waiter was unsure about any ingredient-related questions. He had to run up to the chef to ask (a bad chef who doesn't brief staff?). Also, the other waiter serving the table next to us was annoyingly chewing gum while talking to them... And most of the night they were chatting at the bar on a top floor rather than checking on customers sitting on tables in the lower floor. Very weird vibe

This place needs Gordon Ramsey to come and save it, seriously worthy of a kitchen nightmares...

We are from Texas and we're looking for Mexican food. This was very good. Started with nachos -only recommendation is to have jalapeños or some spicy salsa. The sauce served was great but not spicy hot (which we were longing for.. lol). I had vegetarian tacos which were instead tostados... still very good.I would order these again. My friend had enchiladas which were instead an enchilada casserole. Ok, but he was expecting or hoping for more traditional enchiladas. Service was good. The dining room is just inside the front door and downstairs. It's decorated well, and the sound was good. We could hear each other and barely hear the other people. Worth a visit! ...