I’m not much of a restaurant reviewer, primarily because I’m not all that picky about what I eat. But, I’m always on the look out for good Mexican food — not so much because I’m a huge fan, but because my wife is. If we don’t find good Mexican food, then I’m inevitably going to get burnt out on bad Mexican food. So, last night we stumbled across a pretty decent joint in Lafayette called La Fiesta Burrito. The store we visited is on the north side 350 South near its intersection with 18th Street. It has the best salsa I’ve yet had in town which isn’t necessarily a high bar to surpass, and the steak tacos were pretty good as were the refried beans. The ambiance is nothing to write home about, which is just fine with me.
Oddly, the best indicator of whether I am going to enjoy Mexican food seems to be whether the establishment has Spanish language television playing and whether they have Jarritos to drink. “IF YES, THEN GOOD” (if I might revert to basic programming language here.)
I started to write to disagree with your assessment of the restaurant until I realized you are not talking about the La Fiesta Burrito Express on River Rd- but it would seem that with the closeness in names that they are related… I’ll have to check it out. The one on River Rd had really bad chicken tacos because it was a mix of dark and white meat and the rice wasn’t too good. I may have to go out to this location and order both chicken tacos and steak tacos. I lived in Indy for too long and was spoiled by La Hacienda and Los Rancheros- an option other than El Rodeo in Lafayette would be nice (I have tried Little Mexico 2, La Hibreria (or something like that) and Taco Rico and none of those were any good). I am glad you posted this because I don’t get out to that side of town too often!
Seems like they’d be related, but who really knows. There was a La Fiesta in Monticello that was really outstanding, but I don’t think it was at all related. It closed down a few years ago.
And, just fair warning, I’m no connoisseur. I just know what I like. And, because my wife is such a fan of any Mexican food, early on in our relationship, I burned out on Taco Bell, Chi Chis, and Don Pablos, all of which, I think are crap.
Doug,
Props on the BASIC programming joke. I laughed out loud, and I don’t often do that at your blog (no offense…). Anyway, how sad is THAT?
Some day I’ve really gotta raise a glass with you, and we can reminisce about VARPTR() and STRING FORMULA TOO COMPLEX.
Sounds good to me, but I think you’re beyond me as a programmer. I knew a touch of BASIC, a little more Pascal, and a smattering of COBOL.
As for not laughing, no offense taken. This blog is surprisingly unfunny. Probably I just try to keep the blog family friendly whereas my humor tends not to be.
Ah, sorry about that.
Basically, I’m refrencing two scary, dusty old corners of Microsoft-compatible BASIC from the beginning of the microcomputer era.
VARPTR() is short for “variable pointer”, and it would return the address in memory of the variable you handed it. People only screwed with this only if they wanted to do really clever things, in part for all the reasons fooling with pointers can get you into trouble in languages like C, and in part because you had to do math on the result to get the actual address, math which involved knowing what endianness the underlying architecture was (which made your BASIC code non-portable — not like people cared much back then).
“STRING FORMULA TOO COMPLEX” (or “?ST ERROR” in the more terse, memory-limited BASICs) was a notoriously difficult error message to actually get in practice. To get it, you had to overflow a thing called the literal string tablem which was a fixed-length array of pointers the BASIC interpreter used to manage ad-hoc storage of string literals. The only time I have ever seen this error message was when I read up on how the BASIC interpreter actually worked and spent the time to actually provoke it.
Er, I’m afraid if you didn’t do much programming, this explanation probably didn’t help much. Sorry.