Los Tios — Restaurant in Houston

This place has some potential. The atmosphere was decent and had a good aesthetic. I feel like the menu is trapped in time though and hasn’t been updated for a while. It seems like not much is made freshly anymore and over the years things have just started being bought.

I ordered a frozen strawberry margarita and was pretty underwhelmed. It seemed to me to be a marg mix, and they just added some strawberry juice/purée around the edges. I had to mix it into the marg myself. I LOVE tequila and a good frozen strawberry margarita, but I didn’t even drink half of this one.

For dinner I ordered the build your own puffy queso. I should have known this was a mistake as the menu said it was a “1970 original.” It’s just some kind of fried shell with cheese sauce poured over it and topped with a couple pieces of chicken. It’s hollow? It was not really what I was expecting, but in retrospect I maybe should have? The cheese sauce tastes exactly like the cheese sauce I used to get on concession stand nachos at my high school football games 15 years ago. Pretty sure it’s canned, but even if it isn’t it’s not great. I ended up ordering a quesadilla as a replacement and it was ok. It was about 75% cheese with a little meat inside.

It seemed like every item on the menu didn’t come with sides. You had to order the rice and beans for an added cost. My date actually thought the rice and beans that came with my order were his because he assumed his fajita would come with a side.

The chips were tasty and really crunchy! The salsa was typical and not really noteworthy. The guacamole looked either puréed or bought. It wasn’t great.

The staff were fairly nice and helpful, but no one really seemed jazzed about...

My partner loves this place but for me, it fell flat. I came in during happy hour and asked to sit at the bar with my friends and was told we couldn’t sit at the bar so they seated us at a table. They gave me a bar menu. The menu for happy hour includes $5 puffy quesos. I ordered two consecutively because they were only supposed to be $5 and I wouldn’t order them any other time because their regular price is literally $9 which is insanely overpriced considering that’s the cost of an entire meal for an empty cheese covered shell. For the meat eaters, $9 for one puffy queso might be a deal, but as a vegetarian, my only options for topping was a tiny dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of queso fresco.

We were charged regular price, which would have been about 4 plates puffy queso during HH but only got the two. I asked why I was charged double the price and they said it was because it was only $5 if we sat at the bar even though we were denied bar seating and still given bar menus. I would not have ordered them at all knowing how much they were charging.

I don’t eat meat so there’s not much I can eat here but the black bean soup is meat free and pretty good. It’s blending all the way down to a weird slushee consistency but I think it would be way better texture if they left it with the whole beans. Their fajita plates smell amazing and they have great presentation, even though I can’t eat them since they are...

Los Tios was an incredibly disappointing experience. My date and I were excited to eat and watch a world cup game here, yet the service was in my personal 5 top worst experiences ever. I think being a young ethnic couple did not help either, but this is partly speculative on my part. Most of the people eating there were Anglo and older and were receiving better treatment than us but hopefully, I am wrong. We decided to eat at the bar so we could watch the futbol match since that seemed to be the best seat to watch the game and the bartender there seemed to be agitated by our mere presence. She never brought us chips and we had to ask for them even though she brought them for every other guest that was there. At one point she was cleaning the tables and even threw her cleaning towel in front of my girlfriend while we were eating. She never asked how we were doing, and failed to inform us that half of our plates would be coming at a later time. We had to ask her where the beans and tamales were. She also seemed annoyed by the fact, that we asked her where the rest of our plate was. Overall, the food is basic Tex-mex food that had nothing special about it, and our margarita was the best thing about our lunch. Will never return here again, would only recommend this place if you are older and if you are perhaps of Anglo descent so your taken more seriously as a couple. What a disappointment, I would give zero...