We have been awaiting this day for about 4 years now, shortly after having eaten at Garcia’s in Cortland.  Having not been back to Texas in a few years, we have been without true, cheap eats Mexican food.  Lunch specials for $4.95 and bottomless chips and salsa, how can you go wrong?  Plus, cheap margaritas that give me asthma attacks are sorely missed. 

While Garcia’s Ithaca has yet to get its liquor license, the food is everything we imagined.  To start, the chips should always be free!  And thin and hot and crispy.  The salsas were medium and hot, and very simply seasoned.  We went through 3 baskets.  Shawna got the two enchiladas and taco with beans combo, and I had the two enchiladas and rice and beans.  Grammy got a side of beans that we ate.  Shawna forgot to specify cheese enchiladas, so she ended up with two beefies.  Her hard taco was crisp and reputedly delicious.  The enchiladas were corn tortillas wrapped around what I suspect is white american cheese, or the generic ground beef, and either deep fried or toasted in the oven with a ton of grease, and then smothered in a not-too-tomatoey enchilada sauce.  The beans were so smooth, but not overseasoned, and just tasted like beans.  The rice was well-flavored and soft. 

Grammy was being ornery.  She was compliant for about 15 minutes while we waited for our server/water/meal–she ate a packet of sugar, slid ice cubes across the table, threw the ChocoTaco display, and ate salsa with her knife.  She lost it during our meal, eating a paltry two half-forkfulls of beans, then escaped to the freedom of the aisle and showed the restaurant how efficiently she can pick her nose.  Red-faced, Shawna extracted Grammy’s finger from her nose and stated, “We don’t pick our nose in public,” with the implication that it is perfectly acceptable at home (no comment). 

The meal was in part a celebration of Shawna’s first paycheck from Streetdelivery.com.  We had a hard week, with Shawna putting in a full 30 hours on the road and about 400 miles on the car, Graem in tow.  Shawna’s weekly events included being honked at in the middle of an intersection, being interrogated by a particularly bitchy she-cop, falling into the ditch knees first and twisting her ankle, and taking a picture of a sign on Muscle Car Drive.  To get the first paycheck has certainly made her efforts worth the trouble, and has also put at bay our fears that this job is a hoax!