Garcia's Cantina & Cafe — Restaurant in Alaska

Update 8/30/2023: so ordered my always favorite mini chimi basket. Well they were doughy. My only guess is that they are making their own Tortillas... good on them. But when you wrap a mini chimi in uncooked Tortillas they do not cook properly. So all of the mini chimis were doughy due to the Tortillas did not cook through. Update 3/2022- well ordered a grande margarita, one would think in a Mexican restaurant it would come in a margarita glass, not so anymore apparently???? So my drink came in a water glass??? I ordered mini chimis my usual fav... 3 of the four I eat were doughy? Why? Upside they got rid of the carpet.. nice change there. Update Sept 2021: great job guys. The restaurant and bar area are in great shape, food is back to tasting great. On our last visit one of the owners came around and checked on us and sat down and chatted for a while. Nice to have that home town restaurant feel again. Update: 3/1/20: none of our regular servers or bartenders, food was okay. Service was mediocre. Well they did improve on food, not as salty. Service was good. But loud as a bar, and if you can help it don't sit next to the server cubby..makes it even louder. But not completely sold yet, they don't have the typical tex-mex drink selection since they are tex-mex. And they have chosen not to change the carpet yet. It is an improvement to take down some of the hanging it's that were...

Burnt rice. Microwaved beans and cheese. Hairs. Just two that I was able to find. They were short and white, similar to the hair on my dog who is a blue heeler. So either an old man or a dog cooks back there. I was excited to get the chips ad salsa which is everyone's biggest moment. The salsa was good but the chips tasted like they were fresh out of an expired chip bag. The waitress was very nice though I think I only was able to see her about twice the whole experience. We ordered their big dinner for two so we could get a good variety feel for this restaurant and mexico..well hopefully no Mexicans eat there cause they'd probably try to escape back into Mexico. Aside from me fishing out the appetizer of hairs, I was beginning to feel as though my taste buds couldn't fully taste what I was eating. Most of the flavor came from crisp morsels of charcoal from the burnt meat. But I did as I was raised to and ate all my food, though I couldn't bring myself to stomach the hairs I did find. I did notice that this was quite a bar atmosphere. My wife and I aren't paid detectives but we concluded that this establishment makes it's living on what is known as hangover food or drunk ordering. Sure, if I was slammin em back with the buds, those microwavable mexican dinners might tempt me too. Well, I guess I'll be taking the family to taco bell from now on for authentic hairless...

The bad: This place is expensive!!! Like, expensive enough that we ended up sharing a sampler platter because we didn't want to end up paying $60+ to eat separately. And we still ended up paying over $50 after tipping lol. But that's it. That's the only bad thing!

The food was actually really good. I'm a pretty picky eater, but there wasn't a single thing that I didn't like. Even the worst item was still not bad, and only needed some sour cream, guacamole, and salsa to make it delicious.

They are also extremely generous with some of their portions. On the sampler we got flautas and it was two halves and each had more shredded chicken in it than the size of my fist lol. I'm not even exaggerating lol. Legit. I took out more than half to make another dish after I got home and there was still a whole flauta there! And it was super good the next day.

Some people might not like the guacamole because it wasn't seasoned very much, but I loooooved the pure taste of the mashed avocado and it was super easy to doctor it up the way we individually liked. But it was $4 for a literal sample size side of guacamole. Next time I'll just take my own avocado there lol.

I know inflation is hitting everyone hard so I can't even blame them. I will definitely come back here when we have more people to split...