Impressive Mexican kitchens often occupy humble digs, and La Sirenita is one of the city’s most impressive and most humble.

Entering this cozy space is like walking into a simple family kitchen. Spanish is as welcome as English. The menu is short and sweet; La Sirenita manages to stay focused, unlike the long, meandering, Mexican-American menu at La Bonita, the inferior competitor down Alberta (which nonetheless manages, somehow, to be more popular—ah, the wisdom of the masses).

The meats that fill La… [More]

Those iconic hand-painted signs, the signals of regional authenticity, decorate the expanses of cheap-looking glass that separate this unknown, underappreciated Mexican restaurant from the Tigard strip-mall parking lots that surround it. “Estilo Jalisco,” says one of the paintings—indicating the style of Mexico’s Jalisco state, home to Guadalajara, where the torta ahogada (drowned sandwich)—listed on the menu here as “hogada”—is king. It’s served on a bolillo (baguette-ish roll), stuffed with chunks of juicy roast pork, and bathed in a spicy tomato-and-chile… [More]