The Best Mexican Food in Paris, Texas

It occupies an old art deco service station on South Main, a small white building with almost no signage, which is why people drive past it for years before somebody makes them stop. The kitchen cooks Mexican rather than Tex-Mex, so the default plate is street tacos with cilantro and onion instead of a combo platter under melted cheese.

The chilaquiles are the thing reviewers keep coming back to, and the trading name itself, Tacos Queretaro Mexicanstyle Brunch and More, tells you the morning menu is not an afterthought. It carries the deepest photo and review record of any Mexican kitchen in town.

Family owned and trading since 2016, Dos Marias is the answer when you want a table, a basket of chips, and a plate rather than a taco counter. Every table and chair carries its own hand-painted design, which sounds like a gimmick until you sit in a room where no two seats match.

The menu runs both ways, traditional Mexican plates alongside the Tex-Mex enchiladas and chile rellenos most of Paris actually orders. It is one of only two Mexican restaurants here that the Visit Paris Texas tourism directory bothers to list.

Garibaldi is the incumbent. Its own page describes more than fifteen years serving Paris, it holds a Lamar County Chamber of Commerce membership, and it sits in the Visit Paris Texas directory, which is a longer paper trail than anything else on this list can show.

The cooking is Tex-Mex first with genuine Mexican plates behind it, the portions are generous, and the weekday lunch specials are the value everybody local mentions first. Note that directories disagree about the street number, splitting between 1331 and 1455 Clarksville Street, so we have not published one.

This is a taco counter inside a Mexican grocery on Lamar Avenue, not a restaurant with a dining room, and that is the whole appeal. You order at the counter, you eat tacos, tortas and quesadillas that cost a fraction of what the sit-down rooms charge, and you buy your groceries on the way out.

The bistec tacos are what regulars order. The tradeoff is the schedule, because it keeps grocery hours and shuts in the early evening, so it is a lunch and late-afternoon plan rather than a dinner one.

Alex's has been in Paris for years and reopened in a new location on East Hearne on 21 November 2025, which the local outlet MyParisTexas reported at the time. The move is the reason it is worth checking before you go rather than trusting whatever address comes up first.

It is a small family operation running tamales, enchiladas and fajitas alongside the tacos, with a reservable back room and a daily happy hour block in the afternoon. Older listings still carry the previous NE Loop 286 address, and some map providers show 35 rather than 36 E Hearne.

Tacos Lamar is the widest cheap-eats menu in Paris and one of the few places here running its own ordering site rather than living entirely on delivery apps. The menu goes past tacos into gorditas, pastor and pollo gringas, milanesa tortas and tortas cubanas.

Quesabirria is on the board, which in a town this size is still not a given. It opens earlier at weekends than most of the sit-down rooms, so it doubles as a breakfast option.

Luna Azul is a Lamar County Chamber member with its own website and ordering page, which puts it ahead of most of the North Main competition on checkability alone. The room is a standard family Mexican restaurant done properly rather than an attempt at anything clever.

The margarita list is what people mention first, and the molcajete is the plate to order if you want something more interesting than a combination platter. Service runs fast, which makes it a reasonable weeknight option.

Two things make Mateo's worth a stop. It has a rooftop dining area, which no other Mexican restaurant in Paris offers, and it opens at eight in the morning seven days a week, which makes it one of the few places in town where breakfast and Mexican food overlap.

It is a Lamar County Chamber member trading as Mateo's Kitchen LLC. We have not published a phone number because the only one in circulation is a 469 Dallas-area line that no second source confirms.

Elena's is a family-owned Lamar Avenue restaurant that describes itself as doing both Tex-Mex and original Mexican, and it keeps the longest weekday hours of any sit-down Mexican room here, opening mid-morning and running to nine most nights.

Sunday is the exception and it closes in the early afternoon, which catches people out. One ordering platform carries a West Portal Avenue address for it, but every other source, including its own listings, gives Lamar Avenue.

TaMolly's is a regional chain rather than a Paris original, family owned and trading since 1992 with locations across East Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. We have ranked it last for that reason, not because the food is bad.

What it offers is predictability, a large dining room on the loop, and a real catering operation, which the independents here mostly do not have. If you are feeding a crowd or you want a Tex-Mex plate you have had before, this is the safe call.