Chevy's Fresh Mex in San Francisco, California: A Review

Chevy's Fresh Mex was founded by Californians Warren and Scooter Simmons in 1986, and the names perhaps might clue you in that these were gentlemen of the gringo persuasion. For bonus fun, the chain was acquired by Taco Bell (the king of white bread American junk food posing as cultural fare) a few years later, and it eventually fell into the hands of the Real Mex Restaurants corporation. Aside from Chevy's, Real Mex also owns small California chains El Torito and Acapulco Mexican Restaurant and Cantina, both of which were founded in the 1960s and both of which were owned and operated by Californians who were not exactly Real Mex themselves. For bonus trivia, Real Mex Restaurants is now a subsidiary of Sun Capital Partners, who own a whole bunch of minor retail and food chains like Anchor Blue, Boston Market, Hickory Farms and Mervyn's (well, at least until the latter imploded last year.)

What's the point of all this backstory? In cultures that don't have much of a Spanish-speaking cultural presence or influence in them, such as much of the middle of the United States, you can start up a restaurant like Chevy's Fresh Mex and pass it off as "real Mexican", because no one really has any point of comparison to tell that what you've really done is just appropriated basic Mexican food items and drowned them in epic quantities of cheese and sour cream while preparing them using the Denny's cooking playbook. Ironically, there probably are a lot of Real Mexicans in the kitchens of Real Mex's restaurants, but they're likely forced to work from some corporate playbook that involves a lot of inauthentic recipes and ingredients and a lot of microwaving. The real stuff, the good stuff, is made when they go home. And no, you can't have any.

You can perhaps see now where it takes some brass ones to walk into a city that has a very strong Mexican influence, such as San Francisco, and has so many mostly-authentic little taquerias and restaurants around that even the whitiest of the whiteys in the city knows their way around some Mexican food, and then start peddling your Dennys-ican stuff and trying to call it "real, fresh Mex." Here is Chevy's Fresh Mex doing just that, however, and the sad part is they are far from being the only ones. Perhaps even more sad is that these places still draw big nightly crowds.

I suppose the simplest way to review this is just to ask, "Is there anything worth coming here for?" Regulars seem to swear by the watermelon margaritas and watermelon lemonade. Unfortunately, I've never liked margaritas all that much, but fortunately, the Lady Friend does. She reports that adding watermelon to a margarita maybe shouldn't be considered an improvement, but she can see where your mileage may vary. As far as watermelon lemonade, well ... one day at Trader Joe's, I saw pure watermelon juice being sold in a bottle for $2 or $3 or so, and I thought it was going to be the most epic juice ever. My disappointment in finding out that it really is just kinda nasty and makes a crazy sticky mess out of anything it happens to leak out and touch parallels my disappointment in bringing down a perfectly good glass of lemonade in this manner.

All the food seems to me like it was microwaved from a frozen TGI Friday's box. I know most of it probably wasn't, but that's always what the taste and texture recalls to me.

Here's the rub for all this - the cheapest meal in the house is like ten or eleven bucks, and $15 to $20 per head is a more realistic expected price per person when dining here. So you'll get portions that are smaller than those of the average taqueria which charges half as much. Thank your lucky stars every day, Chevy's Fresh Mex, that you were born into a world ever replenishing itself with a countless parade of fools and suckers.