Readers' Choice: Chompie's Deli
Readers' Choice: Chompie's Deli
Readers' Choice: Z'Tejas Grill
La Tolteca is a bright and cheery superstore, a bakery, restaurant, butcher shop and supermarket where you can buy tamarind candies, dried Jamaica flowers, beer, fresh cucumber juice and beef tongue. But the way La Tolteca is designed, it's the panaderia, or bakery section, that customers must file by first -- gleaming glass cases with pan dulce, multicolored cookies and fresh fruit, guava-filled empanadas, churros, plastic cups filled with tricolored flan, and La Tolteca's supreme delicacy, its tres leches cakes, creamy white sponge cake drenched in sweetened milk, fruit filling slathered between the thick layers, and topped with whipped cream. The tres leches cakes are available in individual slices, or in massive sheets the size of a boogie board.
Now, that gives new meaning to the phrase "sugar rush."
So you head to Sanchez & Sons Printing, where the kindly shopkeeper gives you the option of a custom-made creation or choosing from their vast selection of cartoon heroes. You consider an impressive Nemo-esque clownfish or a badass-looking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, before settling on a SpongeBob effigy.
The good news: SpongeBob won't be around for long -- at least, not in his current form. The bad news: You'll be picking pieces of him off the lawn for months.
It's a lively alternative to shifty hawkers of the midway or the has-beens performing in Veterans' Memorial Coliseum.