There’s little not to love about Tex-Mex, but it’s also hard to distinguish the difference between Mexican food that happens to be served in Texas and Tex-Mex. I have a theory that queso is the difference. Sure, queso literally means cheese in Spanish, but in Tex-Mex it means melty cheesy sauce. Torchy’s Tacos (originally from Austin) in San Antonio had some attractive queso on its menu, but I was also eager to eat its namesake tacos.

So let’s just start by saying the queso came two ways – topped with Texas chorizo or topped with some guac, cotija and diablo sauce. They both had green chiles in them as well, so we opted to try both. Needless to say, they were both spectacular, but the chorizo won out by the very merit of having chorizo. I should also add their straight guac was pretty stellar because it knew to avoid tomatoes and onions, but when queso is on the table guac takes a backseat.

As for my tacos, I went with a breakfast taco called The Wrangler (scrambled eggs, potatoes, smoked beef brisket, jack cheese and tomatillo sauce), The Democrat (shredded beef barbacoa, avocado, cotija, cilantro, onions, lime and tomatillo sauce) and The Tipsy Chick (chicken fajita, spinach, grilled corn, green chiles, cheddar, chipotle sauce and a side of bacon bourbon marmalade). I skipped the onions and spinach on the latter two, respectively.

I should also say that I just listed them above in order from worst to best. It’s weird, right? Because you might have expected the opposite, but it turns out that while all of them were delicious, The Wrangler may have had a little too much egg, The Democrat just didn’t have anything that made it special (read into that as you will) and The Tipsy Chick just blew me away.

I recommend Torchy’s Tacos for anyone hitting up Austin or San Antonio or anywhere else they might be now. It was easily the best Mex I had in Tex and potentially set a new bar for queso expectations.

Tex-Mex is its own category of food. It seems weird because it gives the impression that Texans just somehow bastardized real Mexican food and had the audacity to put Tex before the Mex, but when you remember that Texas was once a part of Mexico, it begins to lose its weirdness. There is probably no place in the state of Texas where the former Mexican history is at the forefront of thought than in San Antonio, home of the Alamo (remember it). And in San Antonio is Mi Tierra, an old school Tex-Mex place with a full on panaderia to boot.

Although it was late at night (and still a couple hours from being considered morning) I was feeling breakfast for some reason. Thus, I ordered the chilaquiles, which I like to think of as breakfast nachos. These came with pork in a thick red sauce, along with red chips, eggs, cheese and beans. I was very excited to dig into them, but within the first few bites I was simply disappointed.

I couldn’t point to any particular reason why I was disappointed. All the ingredients were there, but there just didn’t seem to be anything to them. It was like they just didn’t want to be there, and thus I didn’t really want to eat them. If I could point to anything, it might be that there was a very high egg to everything else ratio.

I’m sure Mi Tierra does other things better than they do chilaquiles, but since that’s all I ate, it’s really all I can go off of. Plus, I can’t imagine there are a ton of other 24 hour spots in San Antonio and when you look at it through that lens you could do a whole lot worse.