You'll be given the tasty corn tortillas that are far more typical of Mexican cuisine. Another nice note: you won't be offered the cheap, flabby wheat tortillas many other local Tex-Mex restaurants now offer you as their default tortilla with fajita dishes and other similar dishes - and they do so because this is what local consumers want. The guacamole is real and fresh, not the horrid green mush that appears to be augmented with commercial mayonnaise served at one much-loved Tex-Mex place in Little Rock. I also particularly like the guacamole tostada, which would be a good choice for anyone seeking another vegetarian alternative at this Tex-Mex restaurant. As I do the chilaquiles, which have eggs added to their spicy chile-cheese sauce, though the chilaquiles served at another nearby competitor restaurant are stronger on the chiles and, to my taste, more delicious as a result. Too few American restaurants serve eggs as main dishes, and I like this option at Riviera Maya. One nice note on the menu are several egg dishes - as lunch or supper dishes - including huevos rancheros and huevos divorciados. They're standard Tex-Mex dishes, from tacos to enchiladas to tostadas and fajitas, always preceded by baskets of chips and a salsa that's light and slightly hot, tasting largely of tomatoes, chiles, and onion/garlic, and without the horrible cloying sweet taste of one of this place's competitors that many people in the middle part of the city dote on for incomprehensible reasons. I won't tell you that there's anything new or different about the dishes Riviera Maya serves. The food is always good, quickly served by wait staff who could not be more helpful and pleasant, in neat, clean surroundings that indicate (in addition to the bustling of the wait staff itself) just how hard the folks who own and run this place work. It has managed to attract a loyal clientele and built a robust business in the mid-section of the city - and with good reason. Riviera Maya (that's the correct spelling, Trip Advisor somehow has the name entered into its database with an incorrect spelling) has proven the food snobs wrong. They acted as if it were beneath their dignity to visit yet another Tex-Mex restaurant serving the same old, same old Tex-Mex food we can get at any number of chains in the city. They wrote articles asking if the city really needs another Tex-Mex place (curiously enough, they never ask the same question about the astonishing number of 'burger' and grilled-meat sports bars in Little Rock that just continue to open one on the heels of another to satisfy our local old boys' appetite for flesh). When this restaurant first opened, food critics in local newspapers were very snooty about it. It's solid, reliable, good at what it does. But because so many of us have long known and loved Tex-Mex food as 'real' Mexican food - and that's understable, given that one of the states bordering us on the west is Texas, the city also has a plethora of Tex-Mex restaurants, and Riviera Maya is one of the good ones. Due to the influx of new citizens from Mexico and Central America, Little Rock now has a wealth of very good authentic Mexican (and some Central American) restaurants. Along with a bunch of locals of my generation, I remember when the iconic Tex-Mex restaurant Brownings in the Heights WAS Mexican food in Little Rock, and when those of us who frequented the place and raved over its cheese sauce (an Arkansas fixation no matter where it's served) and strange dry, tubular enchiladas doused in a canned 'Mexican' brown sauce thought we were eating the very best of Mexican food.

Riviera maya restaurant little rock ar