El Paso Restaurant Menus Four Border Food Favorites
Start with rolled tacos at Chico’s, green chile enchiladas at L & J Café, or a cantina dinner at Carlos & Mickey’s. For fresh masa tortillas and a more leisurely dinner, head to ELEMI in Horizon City. Compare the four menus and check directions before you go.
Compare the Four MenusThe Range of El Paso, From Counter-Service to James Beard
Compare a rolled-taco counter, a historic café, a cantina and a masa-focused restaurant. Each listing links to its menu and directions.
Chico’s Tacos
Founded on July 4, 1953 by boxing promoter Joe Mora, Chico’s is the city’s most famous — and most divisive — restaurant. The specialty never changes: three rolled tacos (technically flautas) sitting in a soupy, tomato-broth sauce under a pile of shredded cheese, eaten with a fork. It’s cheap, it’s cash-only, it’s a late-night ritual, and locals are fiercely loyal to a dish outsiders often can’t explain. Still run by the Mora family.
L & J Café
Known to everyone as “the old place by the cemetery,” L&J has sat across from the historic Concordia Cemetery since 1927 — starting life as a Prohibition-era speakeasy before becoming the family-run institution it is today. Four generations later, it’s still where El Pasoans go for green-chile chicken enchiladas, molten chile con queso, and weekend menudo. People drive across the state for those enchiladas.
Carlos & Mickey’s
Officially Los Bandidos de Carlos & Mickey’s, this east-side cantina is one of El Paso’s longest-running Mexican restaurants and usually the first name locals give visitors. It’s built for a night out — mariachis, a festive room, and the enormous “Texas-sized” margaritas it’s been famous for over decades. The menu includes enchiladas, tacos and other cantina plates.
Elemi
The restaurant that put El Paso on the national culinary map. Chef Emiliano Marentes and his wife Kristal built Elemi as an intimate, taco-focused room grounded in nixtamal — heirloom corn cooked, soaked, and ground into masa for handmade blue-corn tortillas, the same craft Marentes grew up eating on tortillas carried across from Juárez. Led by a James Beard Award-recognized chef, it’s the modern, special-occasion end of El Paso’s spectrum.
Where Each One Sits
Same city, four very different moods. Tap a dot to see where it lands — and why you’d pick it tonight.
Border Food, Decoded
Use these clues to decide what to order on your first visit.
Across the Rio Grande
El Paso shares the Rio Grande with Ciudad Juárez. You’ll see that connection in tortilla shops, rolled tacos and the many ways local kitchens serve chile. Restaurants such as L & J Café also use the term Tex-Mex for their own traditions.
Red or green
Like neighboring New Mexico, an El Paso plate often comes down to a choice of red or green chile — a different tradition from the gravy-style chili con carne that defines classic Tex-Mex further east.
The tortilla is the point
From Juárez-style tortillerias to Elemi’s nixtamal masa, freshly made corn tortillas are treated as the foundation of a meal here, not an afterthought handed over in a basket.
From cult-cheap to James Beard
The range is enormous — a rolled-taco counter that has barely changed since 1953 and an heirloom-corn kitchen led by a James Beard Award-recognized chef, and both are fully, unmistakably El Paso.