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Where to Find Real Mexican-American Food in San Antonio
It all begins on the West Side
Welcome to Hometown Appetites, a recurring look at the way this country eats, neighborhood by neighborhood.
The South Texas city of San Antonio — 150 miles north of the Rio Grande River border with Mexico; close enough to Austin to commute — is often heralded as one of this country’s next great food cities. With good reason: It’s ever more diverse, big and growing bigger, rich in restaurants and culinary traditions and new ideas.
But to really know what makes this city so special, you don’t begin with its Michelin starred chefs in new neighborhoods like The Pearl District, or with a margarita in its increasingly sleek historic downtown. You go to a neighborhood in San Antonio’s inner West Side, and you eat at a restaurant like Old Danny’s Cocina.
Like many of the businesses in this working class, primarily Mexican-American community, Old Danny’s is a modest place, a faded peach and green building on a commercial strip most locals still call Old Highway 90.
Squat and square, Old Danny’s looks more like a car wash than a restaurant. That feeling is enhanced by a drive-thru window manned by the owner’s daughter who comes to help out on the weekends.
But this 60-year-old spot — which Antonio Franco bought 20 years ago when the original owner opened a newer Danny’s in a newer part of town — can maybe afford to be low-key. It has drawn customers for decades: Regulars who come for $6.25 lunch specials; breakfast all day, and comida casera, or the homestyle Mexican-American cooking made all over South Texas.
This is not so much Tex-Mex, whose queso and combo platters arose with 20th century restaurants catering to Anglos, but its predecessor, the Mexican food made in this part of the Texas since before it was the United States.
It’s a local cuisine rooted in the cooking of the indigenous Americans who crisscrossed the Rio Grande before it was a border, which later blended with Spanish and other culinary traditions in the colonial missions still…
