5 de Mayo
3870 Union Rd., Cheektowaga NY 14225
Web: 5 de Mayo
Phone: 716.651.0672
Rating:    [learn more]
Pros:

One of the nicest-looking Mexican restaurants in WNY, featuring a very large and occasionally interesting menu of options. Good service.

Cons:

Dishes generally ranged from less than totally fresh in taste and preparation to plain and inauthentic; only a couple of items were genuinely good.

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Cheektowaga Mexican

"Between the decor and good service, this is a much nicer place to sit and have a meal than many of the other Mexican venues we've visited in Western New York."

One of the biggest challenges in writing about food is separating the appeal of what we see from what we smell and taste: for Mexican cuisine, like that served at Cheektowaga's 5 de Mayo - named for Cinco de Mayo, a day of Mexican pride celebrations in America - this challenge is especially considerable. Some of the very best and most authentic Mexican food we've eaten is the least pretentious, tacos emerging from foil wrappers with chunks of brown steak falling out, or cubed shrimp and fish served cold, mixed with lime juice and vegetables in an ice cream dish. Don't get us wrong: it's not that great Mexican food has to be visually bland, but rather, that there's no correlation between the look of Mexican food and the way it tastes. That's the story here.

Cosmetically, 5 de Mayo's location near the Walden Galleria Mall is an aberration: by Cheektowaga standards, and even those of other Western New York Mexican restaurants, the place is very nicely decorated and appointed with cool little things - a copper wire serving bowl for the complimentary chips and salsa, conspicuous bottles of green and red habanero sauce, and a large, option-filled menu that has a lot in common with La Tolteca, a larger but visually less impressive place in Williamsville. Any concept you may harbor of the Mexican restaurant as downscale will be vanquished on entry here; this is a pretty sharp-looking place.

The food is another story: serious Mexican fans will find it to be basically par by Western New York standards, and not especially authentic in execution. After the chips and salsa, the former almost stale, the latter a little too weak without adding some of the habanero sauce, we decided to order the "Special Dinner" ($12.35). This entree serves as sampler for much of the rest of the menu, providing everything from a Chalupa to a Chile Relleno, one Beef Hard Taco, an Enchilada and a Tamale, to traditional rice and beans. There was so much food in this dinner that it consumed two full-sized plates; any normal couple interested in the items could get away with sharing this and ordering one or two side extras, such as individual tacos or the like. They're available for $1.50 and up.

Sadly, the items on the plate ranged from bland to fine, only occasionally creeping into good territory. The chalupa - also known as a tostada - is basically a flat corn tortilla with salad on top. It was forgettable, served directly underneath the highly similar hard taco that differed only modestly in ingredients. While the taco was one of the good items - a hard corn shell stuffed with decent beef, lettuce, and thin grated cheese - the meat was gone in the chalupa, replaced with a boring guacamole that didn't inspire us to finish the plate. Alongside it was the chile relleno, a stuffed pepper that first-timers would have mistaken on the plate as a yellow melted cheese; it was actually a low-lying fried lump of gold batter, a very thin pepper, and gooey white cheese that had too little taste and too much of an oily body.

Notably, we also ordered a beef soft taco ($2.50) just to see how it compared with what we've had at other local places. The flour tortilla, the lettuce inside, and the meat quality didn't really impress us; 5 de Mayo clearly does better with hard shells than soft shells. As sad as it is to say, we've had better soft shells at Mighty Taco, if only because of the price.

The other half of the Special was generally better; all of these items were on a beautiful, substantially red sauced plate together. Our opinions were split on the tamale, a log of cornmeal and stringy beef that one of us declared overly dry and surrendered to the other, who agreed that it wasn't moist enough but enjoyed it anyway. The enchilada, a substantially cheese-filled tortilla drenched in the same red sauce, was a bigger hit, and the red pepper-flecked Mexican rice was also good. Less appealing were the canned-quality beans, a pinkish goo with pools of white cheese sitting on top; we tried a bite or two and then gave up.

Our other dish was an effort to see how 5 de Mayo did with higher-class items, once we noticed a seafood section on the menu that was heavy on shrimp. We opted for the Camarones a la Diabla ($14.05), or shrimp in a spicy red sauce, served alongside the same Mexican rice and a bed of lettuce that had been topped with fresh avocados, green peppers, and tomatoes. The best way we can describe the shrimp is "modestly better than amateurish," the medium-sized, C-shaped fish apparently sauteed rather than grilled, resulting in a texture that could have as easily been found in a Chinese restaurant.

More importantly, the shrimp possessed very little depth of flavor, relying instead on a sauce that was fine on spice but tasted as if it had been reheated from a bottle. There was nothing especially fresh in the main portion of the entree, and despite the comparative freshness of the salad ingredients, they didn't really come together in any way - the plate just seemed like a collection of lackluster ingredients. Oddly, the highlight of the dish was when the rice was mixed with the leftover chili sauce; in that moment, something seemed to briefly come alive on the plate, making us realize that if the shrimp had been cooked more interestingly, the sauce received some fresh herbs or vegetables, or if the salad had been punched up or even mixed together, everything would have benefitted.

All in all, there was no doubt in our minds that 5 de Mayo sits somewhere below La Tolteca and above Gramma Mora's; while we wouldn't rush to come back, the food here isn't bad, and between the decor and good service, this is a much nicer place to sit and have a meal than many of the other Mexican venues we've visited in Western New York. If you come in with low to moderate expectations and one of the coupons that frequently appear in the mail, you'll have a better chance of enjoying your meal here than we did.