Good friends of ours were telling us about a Mexican restaurant in the Quad City bedroom community of Eldridge, IA earlier this year. "The food is great and the portions are huge," my friend gushed. "You really ought to try it sometime!" On a recent Sunday evening when we didn't feel like cooking at home, we took a trip out to Eldridge to try Cabos Cantina and Grill.
Jose Vazquez is originally from the Santa Ana Pacueco neighborhood in Pénjamo, Guanajuato, Mexico. Vazquez's grandmother always had a busy kitchen making food for her family. In his teens, Vazquez and members of his family immigrated to the U.S. and some ended up in the Midwest, while Vazquez's family ended up out in Virginia.
As a 16-year-old, Jose Vazquez was working as a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant in Blacksburg, VA. The owners of the restaurant saw his dedication and they soon moved the young Vazquez into a waitstaff position in the restaurant. They then moved him back into the kitchen where he learned how to cook and to run a kitchen. He did just about everything in the restaurant including running the day-to-day operations as the restaurant expanded into multiple locations. It was a great learning experience for Vazquez who ended up moving to Peoria, IL to be with family members there.
It was when Vazquez was in Peoria that he opened his dream restaurant, Los Cabos Cantina and Grill with the help of two of his brothers in 2008. Many of the recipes Vazquez used at Los Cabos came from his grandmother's kitchen in Guanajuato. Los Cabos immediately gained a following and became one of the premier Mexican restaurants in the Peoria area. But Vazquez wanted to expand and he looked west toward the Quad Cities where he had relatives living.
Vazquez's cousins invited him to spend some time in the Quad Cities to get to know the area and to possibly scout for a site where to put a restaurant. As I've said many times over the years, the Quad Cities - with a solid and longtime Hispanic population in the area - already has a number of very good to outstanding authentic Mexican restaurants. Undeterred by that fact, Vazquez continued to look for a spot and spied a building in the growing town of Eldridge, just five miles north of the Davenport city limits. The building had been a number of bars and restaurants over the years, but had been sitting vacant for awhile.
Vazquez took over the building in early 2017 and by the summer, Cabos Cantina and Grill opened its doors. Vazquez's brothers Juan and Alfonso, along with his cousin Luis, ran the restaurant while Jose Vazquez came up three times a week from his Peoria restaurant to check in on the operation. In 2019, a small Mexican restaurant that was in a strip mall near the Walmart on the north side of Davenport closed its doors. Vazquez took over that spot and opened Cabos Cantina and Grill 2 later that year.
It was around 6 p.m. when we pulled up to the parking lot at Cabos Cantina and Grill, located just off U.S. Highway 61 at the LeClaire Road exit. (see map) There was something going on as a number of vintage and unique sports cars had congregated in the parking lot and the large meeting room they have at Cabos Cantina was filled with the owners of those cars. When we walked in, we were asked if we were there for the party. Nope, not us. But we did notice more people being directed to the party room behind the bar area while we were there.
Festive and bright colors abound inside Cabos Cantina. The bar area featured a long bar with a faux brick background with a faux awning over the back bar. Cabos Cantina features a full bar including domestic and imported beers on tap.
We were seated in a booth just outside the kitchen entrance to the main dining room. Booths lined the three walls of the dining area with tables in the center of the area. There was a small patio area on the front of the restaurant, but it was sort of warm that day and we decided to sit inside.
As we were seated, we were given menus and it wasn't long before a basket of warm corn chips with a tangy salsa with a hint of cloves and nutmeg was brought to the table. Surprisingly, my wife didn't order a margarita and stuck with water on this visit. I got a large Dos Equis Ambar that they had on tap.
They had an extensive menu at Cabos Cantina - shrimp and seafood dishes, chicken plates, pork and beef entrees were featured on the menu. Of course, they had the Mexican stand-by's - burritos, fajitas, enchiladas, quesadillas and tacos - to choose from. Poblano chile peppers stuffed with a choice of ground beef, beef tips, shredded beef or chicken was something that caught my wife's eye right off the bat. I was sort of interested in the pork chile verde entree they had, as well as the Fiesta Burrito - chunks of pork tenderloin that are simmered in beer and stuffed inside a large flour shell. The tacos al pastor also got my attention.
In the end, I went with the chile verde shredded beef enchiladas. The menu said that it came with two enchiladas, Mexican rice and refried beans. Since there were only two enchiladas on the plate, I went with a ground beef taco. Well, imagine my surprise when I found not two, but three shredded beef enchiladas on the plate covered in chihuahua cheese and a tomatillo salsa. The beef taco was covered with cheese, onions and cilantro.
My wife got the No. 12 combo - a chile relleno with topped with a beef/tomato sauce (as I said, the stuffed chiles got her attention), a beef burrito, and a beef enchilada covered in a molé sauce. All three had shredded chihuahua cheese on top. She exclaimed, "This is a lot of food!" Well, our friends warned us that the portions were huge.
My shredded beef enchiladas were very good. The tomatillo sauce on top wasn't all that salty like you can get with some chile verde sauces. The shredded beef was moist and easily cut with a fork. The ground beef taco that I got was also very good. The beef was slightly seasoned and the freshness of the cheese, cilantro and onions all went well together, flavor-wise. I was able to finish the taco and put a serious dent in the enchiladas, but I couldn't have finished everything that was in front of me.
My wife also couldn't come close to finishing everything in front of her. She said that of the three things on her plate she liked the chihuahua cheese-stuffed chile relleno the best, then the burrito, then the enchilada. "The molé sauce is a bit too much for me," she said as she pushed her plate away so she wouldn't be tempted to eat any more.
Our first experience at Cabo Cantina and Grill was a pleasant one. Service was fast and friendly, the food was very good and there was lots of it, and the atmosphere was festive and inviting. I thought my shredded beef enchiladas with the tomatillo sauce were very good, as was my beef taco that I really didn't need to get. My wife really enjoyed the combo platter that she had - a cheese-stuffed chile relleno with a ground beef/tomato sauce, a ground beef burrito with an enchilada sauce, and a ground beef enchilada with a molé sauce. I was also fixated on the spices in their salsa thinking that I'd like to try to put some crushed cloves or nutmeg in our next homemade salsa just to make it a bit more interesting. Eldridge is a bit of a drive for us, but we do have a Cabo Cantina and Grill in Davenport that we'll be checking out at some point in the near future.
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