Mini Review: Casa Blanca Tex-Mex

“Have you heard of Manny’s?” asked the young girl who escorted us to a table. “Yes,” I said. “Is this restaurant a new location of Manny’s?” She didn’t answer so I asked the waiter the same question. He scrunched his nose up like he’d just gotten a whiff of a durian rotting in the mid-afternoon sun. “No, we don’t have anything to do with them,” he said. Sorry, it’s a bit difficult to keep track of all of the restaurants that have sprung from Ana “Mama Mia” Enriquez’s spot, Mia’s, on Lemmon, but Casa Blanca is yet another one. This time, it’s her niece, Gina, who I assume is the same Gina that the Gina’s plate at Mi Cocina is named after. Dunno for sure. But the food at Casa Blanc is distinctively Mia’s-Mi Cocina-style for sure. The restaurant is in the former Alfreddo Trattoria space up Lemmon from Mia’s about a half a mile from Inwood. Each of our meals started with a complimentary bowl of soup, a nice chicken broth scented with tomatoes and onions with a couple of shell noodles and a bit of white cheese floating around. A basket of thick and greasy chips (not greasy in the good way) arrived with two warm salsas: one green, one red. Nice. Like Mia’s, Tuesday is the night for chilies relleno so I tried one filled with cheese which was as big as my, let’s say, purse. To sample a cross section of Tex-Mex we ordered a Natalia’s, a combo plate comprised of one chicken enchilada stuffed with almost too much chicken (now there’s a gripe you don’t see often), a so-so beef taco, and what has become standard issue in this extended family—an enchilada stuffed with perfectly melted yellow cheese and crispy chunks of raw white onion. I did note the chili sauce covering the enchilada is “thinner” than its Mi Cocina “con carne” cousin, but it was tasty. The interior needs a lot of work. Thankfully they’ve covered the baby blue and pink flowered wall paper that always bugged me when I ate at Alfreddo’s, but they didn’t put much effort into the redo. They painted the walls beige and the room divider green, hung some Mexican tiled mirrors and paintings, stationed some potted plants around, and christened it Casa Blanca. If you like this kind of food, there is nothing about this place that makes it stand out from Mia’s or Mi Cocina. But if you live closer to Casa Blanca, you’ll be very happy.