From the plain decor and ever so common Mexican flag restaurant sign on top of the building, you can tell that Aztecas hasn’t tried too hard with their looks, and after a few bites of a meal you can tell it hasn’t tried too hard with its recipes either. The little orange building at 603 Highway 50 isn’t home to terrible food, it is just more along the lines of your run-of-the-mill average Mexican food.

The chicken in the enchiladas was dry and didn’t offer up much flavor, and the rest of the meal followed suit:  the rice had large chunks of vegetables but lacked any savory goodness, and the beans were a soupy disappointment.

There were two flavor savers though — the margarita and salsa.

I did not indulge in a stock lime-flavored margarita but went for a strawberry flavor instead, which, even though I went with the house tequila, went down smooth and didn’t have the common artificial flavoring aftertaste that can be found in a lot of fruit drinks. And what the salsa lacked in solid content, it made up for with flavor.

Aztecas also has a couple other options, which helped bump its rating to three stars. It has a nice and long three-hour happy hour (tap beer only), and it has a mini vegetarian portion of the menu offering five or six different plates of veggies cooked up Mexican style.

It definitely isn’t something that is going to stick out and give you that craving to eat there again and again. If in the neighborhood though, it isn’t a bad choice.

tfife@mavs.coloradomesa.edu