After dinner service one Sunday evening in August, Andersonville's Marigold unceremoniously closed its doors. I was bummed about that—I think the "gayborhood" needed a good Indian restaurant. Two months later, a cheap-looking banner was slapped over the original awning, and the Marigold owners reopened the restaurant as Bull Horns Taco Bar. Tacos, you say? Stuffed with classics like carne asada or reinvented with fried chicken and bacon? For just three bucks each? Sounds like a fun addition to the Clark Street strip, right?
Wrong. This place is a complete failure—start to finish. From what I can tell, the interior is basically Marigold with a set of bull horns ( the kind that come from an animal ) hanging behind the bar. Oh, and there is one leather saddle perched in the back. However, it is an English riding saddle, which, I hate to break it to these guys, has nothing to do with cowboys, bulls or Mexican food.
I'll forgive unimaginative décor if excellent food is being served. Unfortunately, that's not the case at Bull Horns. I'm a tamale fanatic, so I started with an order of those. Aside from the fact that I couldn't differentiate between the chicken and the pork until my very last bite of each tamale, they were fine, but most certainly not special. You can get much better tamales up the street from the guy selling them out of a cooler in front of Edgewater Produce.
Next I tried the nachos, which were, at best, a joke and, at worst, an insult to Mexican restaurants everywhere. The chips were undeniably store-bought ( and not even the good kind that you splurge on when you want a treat at home ). And, the cheese? It was the scary orange sauce that only baseball stadiums and movie theatres can get away with serving.
I persevered, hoping that the starters would not be indicative of the quality of the tacos. The place does, after all, bill itself as a taco bar. The menu boasts a nice selection of classic tacos like blackened tilapia and barbecue pork, as well as a few quirky specialty tacos that sound intriguing. There's a meatball and marinara taco topped with mozzarella cheese and another stuffed with pork, beans and bacon.
The carne asada taco was filled with some of the driest, chewiest beef I've ever eaten—and virtually nothing else: no cheese, no salsa, no sour cream. Nada, except for a few sad onions. Comparatively, the barbeque pork taco was pretty darn good. But, in reality, it was a scoop of ho-hum pork thrown into a bland flour tortilla. Yawn.
The one high point in an otherwise tragic meal was the bacon, Swiss and chicken taco. A nicely fried chicken strip was topped with a good amount of melted Swiss cheese and topped with a singular piece of crisp bacon. It's basically a tiny chicken sandwich in a tortilla, which is the only thing vaguely taco-like about it. The shrimp taco somehow wound up in the specialty taco section, which is perplexing because there is nothing remotely inventive or interesting about it. The small shrimp, which the menu claims are sautéed in a "ranchero salsa," have no discernable spice. They are topped with way too many peppers, which don't do much to improve the overall flavor of the taco.
The only thing worse than the shrimp taco was the pork, beans and bacon abomination. The black beans could not have been more flavorless—like if you opened a can of generic black beans and ate them cold with a fork, they would taste better than these beans. It's as if they found a way to actually remove flavor from beans, leaving tasteless black mush in their place. The one strip of bacon ( is there a bacon shortage I don't know about? ) and the decent pork couldn't compensate for the flavorless beans.
The only way a taco bar of this caliber could survive in a food town like Chicago is to be a bar that happens to serve tacos—because the only people who are going to eat these things more than once are those who were too intoxicated to remember having eaten them the first time around. Unfortunately, based on my margarita experience, I don't see people running up big bar tabs here ( at least not on purpose ). The "raging bull" margarita looked like a fun time—it's served with a mini bottle of Corona floating in it upside down. But, the margarita tasted as if it came from a mass produced mix, without a hint of fresh lime juice. And, as you sip it down, you're left with Corona on ice, which tastes like the mixology mistake that it is.
I can't help but wonder what compelled the Marigold owners to turn their reliable and at least moderately successful Indian restaurant into a bizarre and uninspired taco bar. Just like the banner haphazardly hung on the front awning, this whole operation feels slipshod—from the runny scoop of sour cream plopped on the plate of tamales to the insanely slow service to the tragically bland black beans to the saccharine margaritas. My advice: Toss the tacos and resurrect Marigold.
Bull Horns Taco Bar is located at 5413 N. Clark St.
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