Taqueria Playa Tropical

During the dinner at Cosca, I was complaining that there aren’t enough good Mexican restaurants in Vancouver. Sherman, being the #1 food blogger in Vancouver highly recommended Taqueria Playa Tropical in New West, so off I went.

I started the meal with a horchata. I didn’t really get into this rice cinnamon drink until this summer. The horchata here is more cinnamony than I expected, still pretty good though.

I also started the meal with 4 tacos: carnitas, carne asada, camaron and pescado.

Carnitas was a slow cooked pork taco with guacamole, onion and cilantro. I found it to be a little dry on its own, it had very subtle flavors. There was a lot of pork on a single sheet of corn tortilla, it needed another corn tortilla just to hold all the pork together.

Carne asada was grilled steak with onions and cilantro. The steak was moist and had nice charred flavor. It was a flavorful taco, I liked it better than the Carnitas.

My favorite tacos here would have to be the seafood tacos. Both the camaron (shrimp) and pescado (fish) tacos were amazing, especially the fish, so flavorful and so yummy. It’s probably because they both have melted cheese on top to make the tacos more moist, the celery added a good crunchy texture. Seafood tacos are the way to go here. I really wanted to order more of these, but I had a chicken enchilada coming.

Chicken enchilada verde is one of my favorite Mexican dish, so I had to order it. It had 4 small rolled chicken tacos and it came with rice and black beans. The presentation is very home styled and friendly (there was a smiley face on my beans).

The enchilada had shredded chicken breast, and red peppers. There were a generous amount of verde salsa, which was awesome. The beans had nice smokey flavor, the rice came in whole grains rather then broken like some other places would serve it. For less than $10, it’s a generous portion, and a very tasty one too.

My friend ordered their Pastor burrito. It was a little different than regular burritos because you’d need to tell them you want to add rice and beans for an extra $2. I’ve never had a burrito without rice and beans, and it was actually pretty good, kind of like a rolled up quesadilla.

Honestly, after the tacos and horchata, I already knew I’d be coming here very often. It was a nice place to get reasonably priced and authentic Mexican food in a quiet and non pretentious restaurant. Yes, it’s all the way out in New Westminister, but it’s so worth the trip! They are open everyday for lunch and dinner.

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Taqueria Playa Tropical
334- 6th Street
New Westminster, BC V3L
(604) 544-5006