MONTGOMERYBAR.ORG
RESTAURANT REVIEW
Tamarindos Serves Up Yucatecan Flavor Explosions in Flourtown By Lydia S. Terrill, Esq.
Tamarindos Restaurant 726 Bethlehem Pike, Flourtown, PA tamarindosrestaurant.com
Open for indoor dining, outdoor dining, & takeout
I
f you’re looking for a place to get dinner this weekend, look no further than Tamarindos Restaurant in Flourtown. Tamarindos is hands-down one of my favorite restaurants in the area. It offers a truly incredible dining experience – whether you are dining out with a group of friends or whether you opt to order take-out. Tamarindos is not your typical Mexican restaurant. Its menu offers Yucatecan cuisine, which, as its website explains, is Mexican cuisine heavily influenced by other cultures, due to the many ports along the Yucatan peninsula linking the area both culturally and commercially to areas such as France, New Orleans, and Cuba. The result is a menu full of creative, delicious dishes with flavors and ingredients combined in unexpected ways. My husband and I have been lucky to dine at Tamarindos a number of times over the past several years, often with a group of friends and some bottles of wine (Tamarindos is BYOB, but it also offers free margaritas). Our most recent dining adventure took place on a chilly November evening. When we arrived, the restaurant was hopping. Although we didn’t make a reservation (Tamarindos only takes reservations for larger parties), we didn’t have to wait for a table at all. We were immediately welcomed by the host and shown to a table in the larger dining room; a highceiling, brightly decorated room buzzing with energy. We were quickly offered water and the aforementioned free margarita, along with wine glasses for our wine. For appetizers, we opted to stick to our tried-and-true favorites of tuna tostada and scallop ceviche. The definition of
14 SIDEBAR
appetizer is “any small portion that stimulates a desire for more or that indicates that more is to follow,” and both dishes served this purpose beautifully. The tuna tostada features a crunchy tostada topped with savory tuna, crispy fried leeks, and a single, perfect slice of avocado. The scallop ceviche is a cool flavor-explosion featuring scallops alongside a salad of mango, radish, avocado, cilantro, and a spicy salsa to pull it all together. Although the three entrée specials sounded delicious, we decided, again, to stick with our favorites: the carne elote (grilled skirt steak with mole sauce and topped with avocado, corn, and queso fresco, served with rice, beans, and plantain banana puree) and chuleta del paseo de montejo (grilled marinated pork chop in dry chile peppers, served with black bean salsa, plantain bananas and a celery root apple salad). My husband, who doesn’t normally like to order pork in restaurants because it’s usually “dry and uninteresting,” says that the chuleta is “one of [his] favorite things [he’s] ever eaten in a restaurant.” The carne elote is a perfect combination of flavors and textures; the tender steak, the sweet plantain puree, the savory mole sauce, the sweet bursts of flavor from the corn and queso fresco all combine beautifully. No two bites are exactly the same. We are not the only ones who love Tamarindos; Craig Laban notably included it in his September 2020 article about the best outdoor dining spots in the Philadelphia suburbs (Tamarindos has an excellent heated back patio). I am truly excited to have the opportunity to recommend it to my fellow members of the Montgomery Bar Association and sincerely hope that many of you try it out, if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed.
