Chilo's — Restaurant in New York

Can’t believe that I’m giving this place two stars. We used to love it. Now it sucks. Honestly, it SUCKS. The quality of the food is wildly inconsistent at best, but usually poor. (Today I had a fish taco that was way too brown-hard-and-crunchy on the outside, but still a little bit raw on the inside. How do they even do that? Throw some frozen meat into some too-hot oil? I don’t even know. But it was small, expensive, and it sucked). At 7.50 for a taco that won’t even fill up a small person, you’re guaranteed to spend around $20 at this small-bite taco truck if you don’t want to go home starving. With drinks and tips (you can’t just tip on one order, btw—food and drink are in separate places so you have to tip twice ) this is now a $35-40 per person place to get “cheap” tacos from a janky old truck. It’s an upside down equation, and it’s really kind of painful. The property is dingy. That’s the best way I can express it. Just dingy. Not bright and happy and uplifting like it used to be in the first few years. Dirty, grimy, sad. The Covid shed dining that takes up the car parking lane next to the building is ramshackle, dilapidated and depressing too, no matter how many coats of bright pink paint they put on it. What a fail, this place. And I used to love it so much. In the beginning, the chef (Chip) was always around and he put a stamp of quality on everything. Now you almost never see him, and the people working here seem like they’re just waiting for their shifts to end. COVID was a destroyer of worlds. But these guys took a pretty cynical approach to surviving the challenge— raise prices and throw quality out the window. I gave these guys two stars rather than one star only because I have some nostalgia for how good they used to be, but it’s pretty miserable now. I’m writing this review after four trips to Chilos’s in the last two months. I’m not rushing to judgment. But my judgment is: don’t bother. I would never bring a date here or recommend this place...

This is how my 4th of July evening goes. I place an order online on their website at 5:42 pm (because it says free delivery for orders over $30). I get a confirmation that my order will be delivered by 6:04. I wait till 7:00 pm and still don’t get my order. I try calling their phone number for the next 15 mins but no answer. Leaving my guest behind, I walk to that place to find out that they are closed!!! I mean WTH!! Why are you still taking orders, charging my card when you are not even open for the day??? They were one of my favourite places to go to for Mexican. Food is still great but this was upsetting. Won’t at least order directly on their website. No way to know whether your order will be delivered or not, unless you want to physically go to their place and...

Huitlacoches were the standout taco of this bunch. The sauce/marinade for the cochinita was flavorful but the meat itself felt a little lacking, which was disappointing — dense and not nearly as tender as the carnitas Tacos on the small side but they are for sure stacked. I wouldn’t consider fewer than 3 for a meal, 4 if you’re hungry — which makes these quite $$ for tacos

Appreciate that they have extra pickled onions, limes, sliced radish etc for you to add yourself, makes the food come out faster and you self-serve.

Btw they now only accept the NYC covid safe APP or a physical vax card. Really weird. Considering the app was literally just the same pic of my vax card I’ve been showing everywhere else… like, literally the same image, reuploaded into the...