Toca Chida
You don't find a lot of Mexican restaurants that look like this or taste like this. We are at Assembly Row in Somerville at one of the area's hottest new Mexican restaurants: Toca Chida Casa Sociale.
Toca Chida is what I consider to be a new age Mexican restaurant. That means the food is a lot lighter, a lot brighter and a lot fresher than the Mexican food we’re used to. The menu here isn't just about Mexico. They have inspiration from throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, basically coastal cuisine from all over the world. Chef/owner Chris Damien has been at this game for a long time, and so he decided to move where the ball was going. This is the kind of food people want to eat these days. Tapas, tacos, and great craft cocktails.
Tacos are the number one seller at Toca Chida and they are all made on fresh local corn tortillas. The menu separates the tacos into two categories. You have old school and you have new school. So there are some tacos that are totally traditional. And there are some tacos that frankly, I've never seen before and I don't know if I'm ever gonna see again.
The number one selling taco is the short rib taco. The short ribs are cooked for over 24 hours. So this is like their equivalent of birria taco, so you have that super juicy tender beef, a little bit of pickled cabbage, chili salsa, wrapped into a tortilla, and this thing is just impossibly delicious.
This old school taco is the crispy fish. You're talking local cod rounded out with some chipotle aioli, some cabbage slaw, and a little bit of pickled radish. That's my kind of fish taco.
I've had a lot of BLTs in my day, but I've never had a BLT taco. It's inspired by the BLT sandwich. The bacon is pork belly. The tomato is actually a green onion, sun dried tomato jam and the lettuce is just lettuce. Frankly speaking, it's better than 99% of the BLTs I've ever had in my life.
Here's another taco you don't find a lot: the Philly cheesesteak taco. Shaved ribeye steak, mushrooms, onions, queso, and some of their homemade pickled Fresno chilies. I gotta taste this cheesesteak taco. Awesome flavors. Pop of heat, pop of sweet. That's a 10 out of 10 Taco. You really get to come here for those new school tacos. You've never had flavors like this before.
Whenever I'm deciding where to go for Mexican food, I think about two things: margaritas and guacamole. And thankfully, they're both incredible here. Making margaritas with fresh squeezed juices and real homemade simple syrup, that makes all the difference. Popular flavors include the watermelon basil Margarita, the charred pineapple and my personal favorite, the spice blood orange Margarita. That is really really good.
Guacamole honestly does not get much better or fresher than this. They're doing tableside guacamole, which I always love and I feel not a lot of restaurants do anymore. It's smooth. It's rich as that great flavor of lime kind of brightens up the whole thing. Just dip in some of their crispy homemade tortilla chips and you are going to be guac-ing with style.
One of the big focuses on the menu here is fresh seafood. And they have some amazing options I've never seen before in a Mexican restaurant. These are the grilled oysters with chorizo butter. So you have fresh local oysters with a nice deep cup and they make their own compound butter that has chorizo sausage in it. So when you take a bite of this, it is super briny. Like you can really taste the sea. And the combination of pork and shellfish just always works. And this one is 100 out of 100.
They also do crudo, basically, Latin style sushi, if you will. This is the epitome of fresh, delicate and delicious. A lot of people come and just mix and match and share all kinds of dishes here. But if you want to get an entree, believe it or not, I recommend the salmon. This is a Faroe Islands salmon. They serve it with some asparagus, rice and pickled red onion. Like everything else here. It's light. It's delicious. It fills you up but it doesn't weigh you down.
Obviously the food and the drinks are very impressive here, but the most eye popping thing about Toca Chida is the atmosphere. The setting totally works with the menu. Bright, open, airy, refreshing, fun, colorful, the food is that way and the atmosphere is the same way. So there are a lot of reasons why you should come here. Toca Chida actually means ‘play cool’. And as far as I'm concerned, this is one of the coolest new Mexican restaurants I have found in a long time.
