Family Cooking at Tio Chava's?

Tio Chava's

18452 Yorba Linda Blvd.

Yorba Linda, CA 92886

One of my favorite parts about writing this blog is watching how passionate people are about the places that they like. They always want me to come and review their favorites and wonder how I am going to write them up. My great friend Sandy wanted me to meet her and her family for dinner at Tio Chava's in Yorba Linda. Always looking for great Mexican food, we headed up to the "Land of gracious living", for a taste of what they have to offer.

Tio Chava's has been open in Yorba Linda since 1999, but they recently moved out of their previous location, to their new digs at the corner of Yorba Linda Boulevard and Imperial Highway. I had never been to their other location before. The restaurant is plain looking and is a decent size. The place is busy this Wednesday night, but they have a table that can fit our party of seven. So let's see how this place measures up.

First, we have salsa. I was hoping for more from this. I thought it just tasted way too bland. Kind of like mild Pace Picante. They did have a fire-roasted salsa that we had later during our meal that was much better. So definitely ask for that one if you come here. The chips were your standard restaurant-style tortilla chips.

Tio Chava's has a special on the front of their menu, you can get five soft tacos for five dollars every day of the week. I was really hungry so I started with this. Above are the five tacos. I choose the carne asada, grilled chicken, carnitas, pastor, and shredded beef, (other choices included, lengua, ground beef, and chorizo). The meat was okay, and they all tasted the same. It was hard to distinguish between the different tacos. I still thought this was a good value because on the menu the tacos are listed at $2.25, so according to my math, we just saved ourselves $6.25, not too bad. 

Here we have Katie's dish. She chose the Tamale and Taco plate. I did not get a bite of the chicken taco but there looked to be a lot of lettuce on it. The tamale tasted very good, not dry, and I really like the sauce that it was drenched in. The rice and beans had a good mellow flavor.

Clay picked the wet carnitas burrito served with rice and beans. This is a pretty good-sized burrito for $6. The meat tasted great and once again the sauce really added to the burrito.

 Here is a picture of Sandy's Tostado. I am not sure what kind of meat she went with here, because you can not see through the mound of lettuce they piled on this. I know that she did like it though because she did finish her plate.

Sorry for the blurry picture on this one. This is Rocio's Ceviche Tostado. This tostada was prepared with onion, cilantro, tomatoes, and shrimp. I did not try this, but it looked really good. and was under $4.

Our big eater for the night was Erven. This was his Seafood Combo soup. This soup featured fish, shrimp, abalone scallops, and octopus. This cost $14, but was really big, and would have been a meal for anyone, but not Erven, he ordered another plate also. He really did like this, and it really had a great aroma to it.

Part two of Erven's food-a-palooza, is the Pollo con Mole Poblano. This was the best dish of the night in my opinion. The sweet mole sauce was awesome. I would totally get this the next time I visited Tio Chava's. Very good dish made with chocolate.

Lastly was my dish. I went with El Trio Enchiladas. One pork, one cheese, and one beef enchilada. These all tasted good, but not spectacular. Again, probably because they had a lot of sauce poured over them, they all tasted the same. Good solid dish though.

This is a good, not great Mexican restaurant. I really enjoyed the mole dish and the prices here were very reasonable. They will definitely get me to come back to explore other items on their menu.

So out of five uncles, five being best to zero being worst, Tio Chava gets three solid uncles.

For more information on Tio Chava's click here: https://www.tiochavasyl.com/