One cool, cloudy and rainy Sunday, my wife and I decided to head out to grab some lunch. We had had dinner at Fuji Sushi a couple weeks prior (click here to read the Road Tips entry on Fuji Sushi) when we noticed a new Mexican restaurant had opened up in a space across the street. My wife was intrigued enough about the place - given the number of very good Mexican restaurants in the Quad Cities - that she wanted to give it a try that day. We headed out the door and down the way to Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant and Cantina.
The building that houses Rio Grande has been some sort of a restaurant off and on for a number of years. Most recently, it had been a Mediterranean restaurant, but that place shut down a few months prior. Restaurants on the west end of Davenport - especially west of Marquette Street - haven't had a stellar track record of hanging on for very long. There are a couple three exceptions - not counting fast food or sandwich chains - but there seems to be a pretty high turnover of locally-owned, family-run restaurants. That didn't deter Juan Bolanos from opening Rio Grande in October of 2020. I asked Bolanos if he was affiliated with any of the other Mexican restaurants in the area as there seems to be a connective tissue with a number of Mexican restaurants in the Quad Cities. He said he was not and much of the food on their menu comes from recipes where his family hails from in a city in the Michoacán state of Mexico, a region known for their highly diverse and delectable dishes.
We pulled into the parking lot of Rio Grande just after 1 p.m. on this particular Sunday. (see map) There were a few spots open in the parking lot and the restaurant was half-full when we walked in. There wasn't much change in the layout from the last time we had been in the place when it was a Mediterranean restaurant. Booths lined the east and west walls, while tables were in the middle of the restaurant. Putting some different signage and pictures on the wall was really about the only difference.
Juan Bolanos sat us in a booth along the wall and left off a couple menus. The picture on the menu is of the central square in the city of La Piedad, Mexico where the Bolanos family is from. (Rio Grande is named after a neighborhood in La Piedad which borders the Mexican state of Guanajuato.) His daughter Mairani then came by with water and to take our drink order. I ordered a Sol beer while my wife stuck with water for the time being.
Traditional Mexican foods - tacos, enchiladas, burritos, quesadillas, etc. - were on the menu at Rio Grande. But they also had some house specialties such as stuffed taquitos (beef and/or chicken), a dish with rib-eye steak, chicken breast and chorizo called La Casuela, and a Hawaiian quesadilla made with grilled chicken and pineapple. Michoacán cuisine also features seafood (the region goes from the sea to the highlands of central Mexico) and they had a number seafood dishes on the menu at Rio Grande. Vegetarian options were also available on the menu.
My wife went pretty basic with the chicken and rice. It featured about 8 ounces of shredded chicken topped with chihuahua cheese on a bed of Mexican rice. She thought it was fine for what it was - simple and straight forward.
One of their house specialties was the carnitas in a salsa verde sauce. It featured slow roasted pork carnitas topped with a very good green salsa with rice and refried beans served on the side. And as I like to do with new Mexican restaurants we encounter, I got a carne asada taco with cilantro and onions on a corn taco shell. I've been told by a cook in a Mexican restaurant (who is also my step-son-in-law) that the best way to find out how good a Mexican restaurant is is to get their tacos first. Well, the taco was certainly very good. The carne asada was flavorful and the cilantro and onions accompanying the steak meat was very fresh.
But the carnitas in the salsa verde was very good. The pork was tender and had a great taste to it. Some flour tacos came with the plate and I made a couple tacos out of the pork, refried beans and rice. It was tasty.
We have a lot of good to very good Mexican restaurants in the Quad Cities and it's difficult to differentiate one from the other sometimes. But we don't have a lot of Mexican restaurants that specialize in Michoacán food, the diverse cuisine that features seafood and agricultural food products. Rio Grande finds their own niche in the Mexican food scene in the Quad Cities with their unique style of Mexican favorites. It's a nice little family-run restaurant and the Bolanos family seem to be the kind of clan that you'd like to support. I hope they have a long and profitable future at Rio Grande.
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