As we strode into Los Felix on a windy Saturday in May, we espied a very attractive young lady pointing an extendable selfie stick at her face as she spoke a thousand words a minute. “Great,” we figured “another self-absorbed Gen Xer sharing the mundane details of her day on social media.” Boy were we wrong. That young lady turned out to be Gaby Camez, a social media influencer who posts restaurant reviews on Facebook. Gaby’s site, Comiendo Rico en Albuquerque, is a celebration of the Duke City’s Mexican restaurants.
Even if you’re not fortunate enough to speak and understand Spanish, you’ll love her site, especially the enthusiasm and respect with which she treats a restaurant’s bounty. When we got home, we (mostly me) listened to her review of Los Felix where I gleaned much of the information on this post. Gaby addresses her listeners as “mi gente” (my people), a term of endearment for her listeners. I don’t know if The Dude and I qualify yet as members of her gente, but I was flattered by her asking if I’m Argentinian (apparently my accent gave me away.)
Under the impression that “Felix” was the owner’s first name, I asked our lovely server why the restaurant wasn’t named “El Felix”. She clarified that Felix is the family name (reminiscent of Mark Felix, a stellar basketball player for the UNM Lobos during the Norm Ellenberger era). The owner (her father) is Lucio Felix. The family restaurant is located on the Northeast intersection of Montgomery and San Pedro in a timeworn shopping center that has seen dozens of restaurants come and go over the years. Los Felix has staying power. It’s been in the same location for six years now.
Lucio Felix has been cooking for years. Before relocating to Albuquerque, he plied his craft at several Mexican restaurants in the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix, Arizona). When he and his family moved to Albuquerque, they started out by making tamales and burritos and selling to people themselves. Eventually, he decided to launch his own restaurant and has made it his quest to provide Albuquerque diners with quality authentic Mexican food. Los Felix serves up made-to-order foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner at very reasonable prices. The restaurant even offers discounted happy hour pricing between 3PM and 6PM. Los Felix has a 4.4 rating on Yelp over 73 reviews as of this writing.
We expected to order off the weekday menu which includes seafood items (mariscos)–ceviche, shrimp cocktail, aguachiles, camarones a la diabla, coco preparado–as well as entrees for landlubbers (marineros de agua dulce in Spanish). Those include some of the usual suspects: burritos, tacos, enchiladas, chile rojo, chile verde and more. As luck would have it, on the Saturday of our inaugural visit Los Felix was offering a bountiful brunch buffet (far better described by Gaby). The buffet is available on weekends with a special seafood buffet available on Mothers Day 2024.
Gleaming metal trays and an electric steam table are replete with hot and cold foods. Our hostess gave us a guided tour of the buffet. At that point we dispensed with our menus and decided to go with the buffet. That’s when our real challenge started. There is just so much from which to choose. My Kim nabbed a few slices of watermelon before trying anything else. We marveled at how everyone else in the Albuquerque area can select a sweet, ripe watermelon. We somehow manage to find only mealy or green watermelons no matter how many vendors have “taught” us how to find the “perfect” watermelon. As an aside, though Los Felix does not offer aguas frescas, Lucio actually made one for my Kim. It was very refreshing.
I was apparently so eager to get started with the buffet that I didn’t see salsa bowls directly in front of me. So you’ll forgive me if the photo of the plateful of salsa and chips just doesn’t look right. What matters is how they tasted. Very few salsas even faze me. The one pictured above, a mixture of napalm and hell fire, actually bit back. It reminded me of the fiery qualities of Sichuan style Chinese chili which is several Scoville units more incendiary than most New Mexican or Mexican chiles. Of course, the more I ate, the more those addictive endorphins kicked in.
At just under twenty dollars, the buffet is a real bargain. For example, the sumptuous smorgasbord includes both ceviche and shrimp cocktail. Both are fresh and delicious. The shrimp have a pinkish hue and snap when you bite into them, both indications of their freshness. With red onions, green cilantro and sliced cucumbers, the ceviche has the colors of the Mexican flag. Shrimp has been the most popular seafood in the US for years, representing more than a quarter of the seafood eaten in this country (so it’s not just me).
Because of my failure to see smaller sized bowls on the buffet table, I served the mole con pollo on the same plate in which I piled on shrimp cocktail and ceviche. The cold seafood dishes leached onto the mole, but that didn’t take away from the velvety richness of the mole. It’s a mole the color of chocolate (which may have been one of its ingredients) with a delightful array of flavors combining to give it a sweet, savory and slightly piquant profile. Make sure you ask your server for corn tortillas to sop up every bit of that mole. This wasn’t a perfect mole by any means. It would have been closer to perfect had chicken thighs or breasts been used instead of chicken legs.
In addition to menudo and mole, the buffet included birria, the flavorful stew served with its braising liquid. Although it’s birria tacos and quesabirria tacos that have conquered the United States, the beef in the stew wasn’t shredded into tender tendrils for constructing tacos. It looks and eats like a stew. That’s not a bad thing. Not at all. Birria is one of those rare Mexican dishes for which it’s okay to use a tougher, flavorful cut of meat that can stand up to slow cooking and the boldness of assertive spices. This birria wasn’t especially bold, but it was comforting and good.
While the buffet included several desserts (watermelon, pineapple, muffins, cantaloupe and cookies), my Kim asked for a dessert from the daily menu. That would be churros with Neapolitan ice cream and a small dollop of whipped cream. Those churros–light, golden and crispy fried pastries dusted with cinnamon powder–are terrific. My Kim doesn’t particularly like strawberry flavored ice cream, so she was very grateful that the chocolate ice cream pretty much melted over everything.
Join la gente at Los Felix where the food options are plentiful and delicious.
Los Felix
6219 Montgomery Blvd., N.E.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
(505) 347-1675
Website | Facebook Page
LATEST VISIT: 4 May 2024
# of VISITS: 1
RATING: N/R
COST: $$
BEST BET: Ceviche, Birria, Mole de Pollo, Salsa and Chips
REVIEW #1395