On November 7, 2016 a few friends and I dined at Taqueria El Porton located in downtown Bloomington off of Main Street. Taqueria El Porton is an authentic Mexican restaurant in Central Illinois. It opened in August of 2002 hoping to provide a different “authentic” experience for customers. Although “Taqueria” means taco shop, they offer much more than just tacos. The owners of the restaurant are Adolfo and Constantina Navarrete. Adolfo envisioned this restaurant growing up on his ranch just outside of Palmar Chico, Mexico. He learned everything to know about cooking from his father who was a butcher and cook himself. Adolfo’s favorite dinners that he wanted to share are Carnitas and Barbacoa. Adolfo and Constantina opened this restaurant thriving to share their home cooked recipes with the rest of the community. …show more content…
The menu contained a wide variety of dinners to choose from along with appetizers and sides. From the moment I opened the menu I was very overwhelmed and had a difficult time choosing what I wanted to have for dinner. With reason, I decided to go with the less complicated dinner, which was the pastor burrito with sour cream, beans, rice and cheese with lemonade. My roommate went with the Costillas De Res, which is grilled beef short ribs with grilled green onions and jalapenos, and Dylan went with a steak burrito (they both tried the Mandarin Orange Jarritos, which they greatly enjoyed). Our waitress did not understand us too well and had to ask another waitress who spoke better English to translate what we were saying. She seemed very frustrated but hopeful on writing our orders down correctly. While we waited for our dinners they provided our table with an unlimited amount of salsa and chips, which was very delicious. About twenty minutes passed and our dinners arrived looking fresh and tasteful. We all enjoyed our dinners and were quite