When you’re walking on the sidewalk, you can feel the buzz at SoCal Cantina. Margheritas and Tequila shots are flowing every day/night of the week. There’s a fair amount of regulars, but newbies like us were able to squeak in.
SoCal Cantina is located in front of the old firehouse in the Brickell Financial District of Miami, FL.
The Place
It’s all outdoor seating. But if it rains don’t worry! There’s still enough space for about 50 people under the awning. If it’s chilly, they have heaters. If it’s hot, they have one heck of a fan at the end of their seating on the side. All in all, the place can hold a total of close to 90. See the overflow picture we took before they opened one day.
Overflow area on side
It’s always busy. It’s so popular, that it can even be jammed at 10:30pm on weekday.
The kitchen is shared with Delores But You Can Call Me Lolita. Sharing a kitchen doesn’t affect how quickly your food comes out though. That’s highly attributable to the excellent staff, Alyssa, Bobbie, Brent and AJ. They’re all very pleasant and want to get your order to you as quickly as possible.
Being a former firehouse, the building had to be completely renovated. As part of that renovation, the owners kept and restored the old firepoles. It’s a pretty cool feature and adds to the ambience of the inside on both the first and second floors.
Parking is on the street or in parking garages. We got there after 6pm, parked on the street and it wasn’t too expensive. When we went a second time, we got an Uber from where we were staying and it was a little more than parking, but…we didn’t have to drive so it was well worth it the couple extra dollars.
Taco Tuesday
Taco Tuesday is a real thing in a lot of places. But at SoCal Cantina, it’s a madhouse. And they have really good tacos. Finding a seat on Taco Tuesday is like trying to find a space to park your car at the mall during Christmas. Not impossible, but it may take a hot minute.
They’ve been known to sell over a 1,000 tacos on a single Tuesday night. That’s a lot of tacos!! The reason they can sell that many tacos is that the tacos are that good, and on Tuesdays they are even cheaper.
Their selection of different types of tacos is impressive. Most places have 2-3 available choices for their Taco Tuesday. Some places have a choice of 5, but SoCal has 10! 10 different tacos on their menu all part of Taco Tuesday! We didn’t try them all, but we did have a number of them and everyone we had was really tasty.
As you might imagine, they have a few different margherita flavors as well. They are ALL skinny. No lie!! They have their own secret recipe. They use only fresh ingredients. So even though they were skiing, they had a lot of flavor. We ended up trying a few of them. Dianne had her favorites, the garden margherita and the regular margherita.
We liked it so much, we went back several times the week we were in Miami. It’s a great place to cap off or start the evening, depending on what you’re doing that night.