Tag Archives: Latin American restaurants

Los Latinos

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Los Latinos, 128 Mitchell St, Maidstone. Phone: 9318 5289

We were random but regular visitors to Los Latinos in the months after our write-up of the Maidstone Latin American eatery, early in its life.

But it’s been a while, so it feels nice settling in for lunch.

I’ve done what is almost unthinkable for me – leaving home without a book – but am satisfied enough with a house copy of one of the weekend rags.

It’s the wrong one and the wrong size, but I enjoy reading the foodie bits and the sports section anyway.

The menu seems to have grown quite a bit – featuring more seafood, more main courses and dishes listed by nationality – than found on the menu at the restaurant’s website.

The first thing I am told by a staff member is that tamales – one of several dishes on the menu marked with “not available” stickers – are in fact very much available.

I order them and end up very glad I have done so.

Isn’t there something totally magical and mysterious about food that comes in packages?

Think of dumplings, for instance.

In this case, the banana leaf wrapping on my two tamales unfolds to reveal two good-sized slabs of cornmeal masa (south-of-the-border polenta?), each one filled with some tender chicken on the bone, a couple of green olives, a long and well-cooked green bean and a big chunk of super potato.

It’s all delicious and filling – and a pretty good bargain, too, at $10 for the lot.

The benign seasoning levels and smooth pastiness of the corn mash are the perfect foil for the salsa/tomato sauce on the side. Drizzled across both tamales, it has a nice slow burn that eventually has a sheen of perspiration breaking out on my forehead.

Since Los Latinos opened, Melbourne seems to have contracted some form of Latin American fever, with quite a broad range of eateries generating a lot of talk and blogging and reviews.

And queues.

My lunch is a timely reminder that there’s a fine place just up the road doing lovely work along such lines – without the trendoid brouhaha.

Tacos Panchos

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Point Cook Town Centre Food Court. Phone: 9395 5746

A big thanks to Deb at Bear Head Soup for the great tip on this one!

Point Cook is, of course, very much part of our greater west neighbourhood – but until now it has been mostly somewhere through which we passed, or bypassed, on our way to somewhere else.

There’s no reason why such should be the case, but I am a little surprised by the size and bustle of Point Cook Town Centre when I emerge from the underground car park. Yes, it’s mall territory, but it’s laid out like a real live village, with streets and cars and stuff.

Besides, I reckon the days of dismissing malls, shopping centres and the like of being of no consequence or interest when hunting for places that trade in cool, funky, cheap and tasty food are fading fast, especially here in the spreading west, with its enthusiastic tribes of food nuts, each eager to make their own tastes and flavours available.

In any case, it’s quite a thrill to see such a colourful food outlet in an otherwise standard, mid-sized food court, although the two Asian places look of more than passing interest, as does the burger joint just past them.

Tacos Pancho is festooned with stencilled drawings of fabled Mexican wrestlers and other icons, and fronted with your authentic Mexican tiles, while the serving counter top is facsimile of the streets in which this food is sold in Mexico and Latin America.

I leave the tacos and burritos for another day, and instead order a couple of quesadillas – two kinds of filling wrapped in soft flour tortillas for $8.90.


While awaiting my food, I peruse a copy of Around Point Cook, a cracking little rag that seems like a paragon of the downhome, old-style community newspaper. (You can check out Around Point Cook here.)

My meal, when it arrives, looks a tad skimpy, but turns out to be a surprisingly filling lunch.

The chorizo and bean quesadilla is salty, cheesy and tasty, with about six slices of chorizo. The beans could’ve done with some more heat.

I’ve never been a fan of pineapple in otherwise savoury food, and indeed the fruit in the pork quesadilla does somewhat overpower the crunchy and moreish meat. The quesadilla is finished with finely diced onion and fresh coriander. I like it.

Just around the corner, I spy a keenly priced Indian place and a Vietnamese establishment that looks pretty flash ($12.90 pho, anyone?), and spot another cheap Indi place and a kebab outfit on the run home, so this is a neighbourhood worth some in-depth exploration

I meander home on the back roads, driving through industrial estates and even past the odd paddock.

It’s interesting to drive beside, over, under and around the freeway that is so often my route of commute.

Tex-Mex on the sound system, of course – specifically the contents of a parcel from Arhoolie that arrived the week before.

As I know La Morenita in Sunshine is going to be closed for a week or so, I drop in for a bunch of empanadas I ordered the previous day. Into the freezer for them!

Nothing much else to add … ‘cept Viva The Western Suburbs, Baby!

Tacos Panchos on Urbanspoon


La Morenita Latin Cuisine

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67 Berkshire Rd, Sunshine North. Phone: 9311 2911

Update 19/9/11: Review of La Morentia’s new menu here.

I reckon Bennie and I could have spent many years longer without twigging there was a significant Latin American/South American enclave living in the midst of our extended neighbourhood.

But a switch of schools from Footscray to Sunshine removed the veil.

The first sign came on a school day on which the lunch box was not packed, so we resorted to the sandwich shop on the shopping strip adjacent our school. As we waited for our ham and salad roll to be made, I took great interest in the pie heater in the corner. “Hey, Bennie, I reckon those there are empanadas,” said I.

And so they were. We bought a bunch to take home after school, had them for din dins that night  and they were beaut.

As we settled in to the new school routine, we devised a slightly longer route that avoided the franticness of Ballarat Rd for back roads that at least featured a more measured pace and a few trees, along with hundreds of auto repair shops of various stripes, barbed wire and a junk yard dog.

As we were closing in on school one day, tooling along Berkshire Rd, I spied some interesting signage, and said to my food hound buddy: “I’m betting that’s another South American bakery.”

And so it was.

We dropped in that afternoon after school and have been returning ever since on a very regular basis.

Cheese and prawn empanada.

La Morenita (the signs outside actually say Empanadas Las Penas) caters mostly to the local South American community – orders for cakes and catering, along with wine, chorizos, ribs and a variety of cured meats. It also hosts a modest range of  grocery lines.

But there are several attractions for blow-ins such as us, and the place has been steadily fostering lunch-time trade from the hundreds of close-by workplaces.

The big stars for us are the empanadas – flat pastie-like parcels of deliciousness.

We love the beef ($2.50, each of which comes with a little sliver of black olive and another of hard-boiled egg) and the chicken ($2.80). Both oven-baked, these can be had hot and tasty on the premises.

However, we’ve also found they’re great to takeaway and bung in the freezer.

Even better, they provide a cheap and fine way of breaking up the boring routine of work and school lunch boxes – even if the more traditionally minded patrons, we have been led to believe, are somewhat aghast at the idea of eating empanadas cold! Works for us!

Some of the other empanadas – such as the cheese ($1.80) and the prawn and cheese ($3) – are deep fried, no less delicious, but don’t work when unheated.

Also strictly for eating-in are the sandwiches – so gooey with goodness that taking away is simply unthinkable.

My favourite is the churrasco ($5) – steak sandwich with avocado, tomato and mayonnaise (above). The sliced beef is juicy and tasty, the rolls fresh, the whole thing a delight. And certainly a whole lot more appetising than my photo indicates!

Bennie likes the completo ($5) – a South American-style hot dog with the same trimmings.

Unlike the other two South American bakeries in the area, La Morenita doesn’t specialise in cakes and sweets, though the ones we’ve tried have been good. There’s a lot of crunchy pastry and much use of a sticky caramel cream filling.

And even though it’s not really set up as a cafe, we’ve also had many, many lattes and hot chocolates of a pretty good standard.

We love this place and the welcome we get.

You won’t get anything approaching a proper sit-down meal here – there’s no tacos or the like, as found at the newly famous Los Latinos just down the road apiece.

But the empanadas and the sandwiches are unreal!

Closed on Mondays.

Los Latinos

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More recent review here.

128 Mitchell St, Maidstone. Phone: 9318 5289

Bugger it – I hate getting beat by The Age, especially by just a day or so.

But that’s just the way it worked out.

The end of a rugged week of work and school, a Friday full of crap weather, the run home from Sunshine, after-school care and a white-knuckle drive to and from Geelong.

Approaching Ashley St, we pondered our options – home, Cartoon Network and A-League with Chinese delivered; home and then out again to eat (not really an option at given the weather); and then – inspiration! – why, heck, a slight detour and … we could check out the new Latino place we’d heard about.

And failing that, we could opt for the funky Chinese place in Mitchell St that had long been on our “to do” list.

Pulling up outside Los Latinos, we appraised once again the retail strip we had last checked out very early in the year.

The Chinese place was still there, looking just as enigmatic as ever.

So, too, was the Latin American bakery where we’d had empanadas and coffee.

As well, there a cool-looking antique/odds’n'sods shop that seemed well worth a look – on another day.

And right there in the middle was Los Latinos – even early in the evening open and inviting.

Nina Rousseau nailed it good – Los Latinos is, indeed, “a grand addition to the west”.

We left an hour later rete, replete and smiling after a meal of lip-smacking joy.

The menu is not long, but we opted for the dips and corn chips ($6), followed by a serve of pupusas ($10), not wanting to put to big a dent in our wallet.

And then we wrecked that plan by ordering a $3.50 bottle Jarritos guava fizz from Mexico. Oh well …

The corn chips were good and blessedly free of excess salt and ghastly chemicals. The dips – cheese, guacamole and what was described on the menu as “green tomatillo” but was actually, unmistakably red  – looked a touch on the meager side. But they went the distance just fine, and all were tasty.

Despite some familiarity with South and Latin American food, we were unfamiliar with pupusas. They are, it was explained, a righteously popular and ubiquitous staple of El Salvador. The same flour as used in tortilla is made into a dough, then small balls. Into a hole in each ball is inserted the filling – in our case, a combo of cheese, beans and pork. The pupusas are then gently flattened and pan fried.

The results were mucho delicious, amply filling yet light as well. They were served with a tiny jug of salsa and curtido, which turned out to be a spicy, tangy, pickled salad of cabbage and more (I suspect).

At $10 for a serve of four, these constitute a superb and cheap meal for one. But as we were sharing, we were still a little light on.

So we ordered another entree – chorizo and salsa ($6). It was another winner, though we could have used about double the number of small, if very fine, tortillas that were provided to mop up the hot salsa.

One thing this dish did do for me, however, is confirm that my ingrained habit of merely grabbing any old chorizo from the supermarket has got to go. This one had quite distinctive and oh-so-tasty seasoning and flavour. Not all chorizos are created equal, it seems.

The menu also features fajitas ($18.50), tacos ($10.50), tamales ($10), porcion de pollo (fried chicken with onions, coriander and lemon juice, served with rice and tortilla; $12.50), as well as the completo (Latin Hot Dog; $6.50) and nachos ($10).

God bless Los Latinos – it’s helping make what was one a rather bleak backwater into yet another western suburbs foodie hot spot!

You can read Nina Rousseau’s Age review here.

Los Latinos on Urbanspoon