This Is The Best Mexican Restaurant Chain To Eat At, According To Reviews

Austin, Texas is known as the state's weirdest city, but back in 2011 a fast casual taco chain with its own strange menu arose out of nearby Dallas. Self-described as "unique and funky," Velvet Taco completely rebranded one of Tex-Mex's most iconic dishes. You'll find tacos there, but they come with a twist on classic Mexican-style flavors like birria or delicious beef barbacoa. Instead, expect tacos filled with chicken and waffles, bacon smash burgers, pulled pork and Korean fried rice, and fish and chips. The restaurant also has a vegetarian selection that includes tacos filled with beer battered cauliflower, fried paneer cheese, and Nashville hot tofu.

You won't find your average street taco anywhere in sight at Velvet Taco, but that's what customers love and why it topped our ranking of popular Mexican restaurant chains. "It's a completely other thing from authentic tacos that has its own appeal," wrote one patron on Reddit. "Sometimes I just want an Indian type curry chicken in my tacos other times I want the real thing. It is like comparing real Chinese food to American Chinese food, nothing alike but both enjoyable in their own way."

The menu has gotten great reviews, but there is one order at Velvet Taco that has everybody talking: the Tikka Chicken Tacos. They're built with a flour tortilla and filled with crispy chicken tenders, spicy tikka sauce, buttered cilantro basmati rice, raita crema, and Thai basil. "The tikka chicken tacos are a MUST," wrote one Yelp reviewer. "The flavor is great and, for me, the basmati rice is perfect tie-in for texture in the taco. I got three of them."

The vibe in the chain is irreverent and experimental all the way down to Velvet Taco's dining room design and marketing strategy. It advertises dishes on Instagram with emojis and participates in cultural references on TikTok (recently announcing banana and peanut butter tacos next to a stuffed animal version of Punch the baby monkey). It walks the line between fast food and sit-down dining in a way that shakes up expectations immediately and then follows through with its menu of unexpected fusion foods. 

One customer on Yelp summed it up like this: "The ambience is interesting, because Velvet Taco can confuse you to make you think it is a sitdown restaurant. It's not, think of it as cava adjacent. It's nice enough that if you wanna come have a meal with your friends, you can, you can even have a cheeky little date night if you want to. But don't expect it to be that of a full fledge restaurant."

Velvet Taco has a rotating Weekly Taco Feature menu (WTF for short), a special that highlights new creations every single week. The week of March 25, 2026, for instance, Velvet Taco featured Chicken Caeser Smash tacos filled with a chicken smash burger, romaine lettuce, tomato, chipotle Caeser, queso fresco, and spicy croutons. The ingredients are top-notch, too. Velvet Taco landed on our list of chains that use the highest quality ground beef in their tacos, and reviews praise the joint for dishes bursting with flavor and fresh ingredients.