Café Castro

Love this place. After reading the reviews I decided to try it. I have been there twice. The food is delicious and the prices are incredibly cheap especially for what you get. The 1^st time I had the layered enchiladas. The 2^nd time tacos. The sopapilla they give you is huge, the size of your face! I definitely recommend this family owned café.

Weary travelers from California yearning to once again taste good mexican food. After one attempt was thwarted we found this place. Small and diner like it has a comfortable atmosphere. Service was slow for a Tuesday night, but when you have only one waiter serving 8 to 10 tables of varying size parties, it should be expected. He did a good job despite that. The food was very basic mexican food that could be found on almost any menu. The flavors were deep and very satisfying. While nothing was «the bomb», it was solid food to wet that appetite.

This was some of THE best Tex-​mex food I’ve ever eaten! This was our first meal here in Santa Fe and I used the Unilocal app to recommend a restaurant, and we ended up here. It was excellent. :)

Mediocre food! Tamales so so, as were beans. No chips & salsa served. Appetizer of guacamole bland, chips seemed right out of a bag.
Might deserve 3 stars if not for the outrage of serving parboiled rice! Inexcusable.
Seriously, with all the great restaurants in SF, why would anyone come here?

Great food and awesome service! We ordered the classic items — Chicken fajitas and veg enchiladas — and they were perfect. The Chicken was very delicious with a crunchy outer layer and well done (the way we like it). Hospitality and the music from the mariachi duo will keep you wanting to come back again.

Excellent real New Mexico food without the tourists and lines to get in. Had the carne asada with a tender juicy piece of steak, green chile and pasole. Really good value and an all around good meal!

Found this place on Unilocal,and saw a steak dish on the menu which was what drew me here.
I got the 10oz New Mexican Steak, which was a rather big slab of meat that came with rice, refried beans, a cheese enchilada, and a soupaipilla. The soupaipilla was really, really yummy!!! Super addictive!
My meal was super filling and although not mindblowingly fantastic, it was great in its own right and definitely super worth its price of $ 10.99.
My boyfriend got chicken fajitas, and his was good as well. The salsa was yummy, a little sweet with a tangy spice, and the Christmas chiles were nice.
All in all, our total bill was $ 22.68, which I thought was reasonable. I would totally come back here again! The service was impeccable too :-)

So much food for the price! And good food too with just the right amount of spice. You can tell this is the locals choice for restaurants — no tourists. And this is way off the plaza… But we’ll worth the trip!

This will forever be how I remember Santa Fe. Really sweet people. Very tasty food. And an ol guy serenading the crowd. Great spot for groups or families. A must try.

I really enjoyed the green child on my chalupas. Didn’t get til the food came that everyone gets a delicious freshly fried sopapilla. Would come back for sure.

Very good. I had the tortilla hamburger while my boyfriend had a stuffed sopapilla, both which were delicious. We also had the chili con queso which was tasty as well. We will definitely be back when we visit Santa Fe again.

Great service, nice portions excellent food and the prices are good. I go there often with friends and family.

Quick look rating: ⁵⁄₅ Food & Quality, ⁵⁄₅ Service, ⁵⁄₅ experience — will I return?
Chips & salsa for 3 bucks, enchilada plate 8 bucks, relleno plate 9 bucks, side relleno 3 bucks, total 23 bucks. Server was Castro on 8−15−14 @ 7pm, nicely done sir! The wait staff worked well together just like a well oiled machine!
Note: This is not one of the main tourist stops. We called and made reservations which I highly recommend!
In Santa Fe, you have to be aware of the times and dates with the crowds, like the festivals, music and art events!
Loved the little place, the food was fantastic, and yes I will be back!

The food here is generally decent to good, of course it really suffers from the local practice of dumping red/​green chili on everything. Do yourself a favor and have the chili on the side, it makes for a nice accent to some dishes, but the food is usually better without it. As to the staff, they’re almost always friendly, and are always energetic and efficient, so service here is way above average for Santa Fe. Overall, if we were staying here I would eat here again, I just wouldn’t be in a hurry to do it.

My husband and I found ourselves here recently during a trip to Santa Fe. We were staying down the street, and it happened to be our 10 year wedding anniversary. We have a little one, and since we don’t always know what behavior awaits us when we go out to eat, we try to pick smaller, family type restaurants and go early. We did that here.
We started with the nachos, and added beef and green chili. The waiter suggested it on the side, in case it was too hot. We loved it though, and it had just enough spice to it. My husband got huevos rancheros, and I the burrito/​enchilada platter. With our selections, we tried the red chili, which was equally as good.
Great food, great service throughout. Oh, and the sangria was on point!

Great small restaurant that serves great New Mexican food. The red chile has a very dark almost smoky flavor that you can’t find anywhere else. I usually order the combo or enchilada plate. Never been disappointed here.

Old school place loved by the locals. Sopapillas, the puffed fry bread staple of New Mexico are excellent. The service is good but the food? Make me a Castro’s carper, but sliced processed roast beef sandwich meat in your roast beef burrito? Just whip out the can of Spam and be done with it. I never get a good meal here. Ever. I try. Call it cockeyed optimism or maybe it’s just that my daughters have fond memories of the place. I always leave feeling like the foodie Charlie Brown, with Castros as my nemsis Lucy, pulling the quality food football out of reach as my meal hits the table. ARRRGGH!
It tastes to me like the meats are very cheap product drowned in sauce and cheese with the hope that no one will notice. The sides are also really pretty uninspiring. Beans are mush and the posole is flavorless. Sorry, but it’s more rough than diamond. This middle section of Cerrillos Road is full of these New Mexy joints with food that is just not good. People eat at them out of habit, or fond memories of uncles spilling red chili on their Sunday best reaching for the honey to go with the sopapillas. Tourists, keep driving North until you hit either Marias or Tomasitas if you’re looking for real-​deal New Mexican that’s at least made with meat that doesn’t taste like rubber flavored beef.

This place was kind of really disgusting. I always hate eating food that makes me catch myself sitting there wondering what that random stringy thing in my beans is or the puddle underneath my chicken is or what the source of the bubbly corner in my soda is. I know it could be all in my head, but this place is pretty disgusting. The tables have this sticky feeling to them and the food is incredibly greasy and salty. I felt pretty miserable inside after eating my fajitas. I got heartburn which I haven’t ever had in my life before. This is easily the most disgusting place I have eaten in a long time. I think Santa Fe is full of these nasty «4 star» restaurants that the locals love. This is the kind of place that people who don’t know good food eat at so they don’t have to eat fast food again.
I have said it before and I will say it one more time.
I weep for the people of Santa Fe.

Having only patronized Café Castro once, my rating is «A-​ok».
Service is quick and accommodating. My kid refuses to eat the majority of vegetables. This includes tomatoes and lettuce. He requested both of these accoutrements to be excluded from his kids taco meal.. . and they were. He loved the rice which came with his meal. He requested a double order. He proclaimed his meal to be delicious but refused to eat the beans.
On to my meal. I ordered the enchilada dinner. It came with two enchiladas, posole, beans and rice. The beans were ok and to be truthful, I’m not a refried bean fan. The rice was pretty good and the enchiladas were pretty good as well. Everything was just «pretty good». The flavor of the chicken was good but I was a bit disappointed that it was not flavored up more than it was. Of course, this is my personal preference, and may not be «Santa Fe Style», but I love some cumin and chili seasoning (preferably ancho chili) in my chicken. I went with green chili over my meal. The chili was a bit spicy but not so much so that I could not hang.
I also ordered a glass of sangria which was adequate. I actually liked it more than that. It was good.
Something that I really enjoyed was the huge sopapillas that came with the meal. These fried, puffy pillows of dough were very good with honey drizzled over them.
The price was pretty good. For both my son’s and my meal, it was $ 17.00 and some change.…not including the tip.

I really used to enjoy this spot and was a regular here. However I hadn’t been to eat here in a while. I happened to be in Santa Fe a few weekends ago and stopped here for breakfast. I was a bit disappointed to find that they didn’t offer a breakfast menu. Their menu had two breakfast things and that didn’t even include a breakfast burrito. I had to ask if they actually served breakfast burritos since it wasn’t on the menu. Also they didn’t have ham which is what I usually get in my breakfast burrito so I just had a meatless breakfast burrito.
I ordered christmas as usual and the food is the same quality as I remember. The red chile is always spicier than the green chile. Also their green chile is more of a chopped consistency than a gravy. Awesome sopaipillas! I like that you can order whole beans here as well as I prefer them to refried beans.
Good place to get your NM fix for a reasonable price. Just a bit disappointed on the breakfast menu offerings.

This may be my favorite restaurant in New Mexico. I knew something right was going on here when at 6pm I showed up in the parking lot and it was PACKED. The rest was not disappointing. The service was good, attentive. For instance, you can pay at the counter, but my server went ahead and took my information and got the payment processed for me.
But back to the food, which is the real reason this place is spectacular. They don’t offer free tortilla chips, which was probably okay, because I eat WAY too many of those anyway, and end up full by the time my meal arrives.
I ordered the chile relleno plate, Christmas, and I was blown away. It was deep fried, some of the thickest batter I’ve had on a relleno, and came with rice, beans and hominy. The chiles were even seeded well. The red and green chile were also some of the best I’ve had in New Mexico, and they were both SPICY!
I’ll try to max out all the New Mexican eating I can in Santa Fe, but I will definitely come back to Café Castro at least once per visit, again and again and again. Well done!