Mexican Restaurants in Central Tampa

My New Year’s resolution for 2021 was to try a new Mexican restaurant (primarily food trucks and small places close to us in Wellswood) each month for all of 2021. To make the comparisons across restaurants I tried to be fairly consistent and order Mexican street tacos (at least one chicken and one steak) at every restaurant so we could compare across them (I did that at all of them except Renzo’s).

We just wrapped up the resolution with our last restaurant in December. It was a good experiment. We found three restaurants that are all very close to us that we will definitely be returning to (top three). By no means did we try even a small fraction of the Mexican restaurants in Tampa. It may well be the case that there are other, great Mexican restaurants that we need to try (if so, comment below; and if you’re a restaurant and want to comp me a meal, I’d go for that, too).

Here’s the list from best to worst (if you click on the links, you’ll see my review for that restaurant).

1. Los Comparres – 5 stars (first place we tried; only place we’ve been back to so far – chicken tostadas are amazing!)
2. Taqueria Mi Mexico – 4 stars (but best chicken street tacos we found)
3. Crazy Burrito – 5 stars
4. Chiles Mexican Restaurant – 5 stars
5. Rocky’s Tacos Tampa – 5 stars
6. Xtreme Tacos – 4 stars
7. Miguelitos Taqueria & Tequilas – 4 stars
8. Rene’s Mexican Kitchen – 4 stars
9. Grandma’s Tacos – 4 stars
10. Renzo’s – 4 stars (actually, Argentinean, so it really doesn’t belong on this list)
11. Lolis Mexican Cravings – 4 stars
12. Tacos Las Californias – 3 stars