Open Sunday, Open Late: What the Hours in Our US Directory Show

We hold opening hours for 607 of the 630 active Mexican restaurants in our US directory and for 511 of the 536 stores. Hours are the most practically useful field in a directory and the one that goes stale fastest, so take everything below as a pattern across the whole set rather than a promise about any one address — call ahead for a specific trip.

Sunday is not the closing day

This is the finding that surprises visitors from Europe. Of the restaurants where we hold hours, 548 open on Sunday and only 59 are closed — 90 percent open. Sunday is a working day for Mexican restaurants in the United States, and in many cases it is the biggest one of the week: barbacoa, menudo and pozole are Sunday foods, and families eat out after mass.

The day that actually closes is Monday. 112 of the same set are closed on a Monday, nearly double the Sunday figure. If you are planning a trip around one restaurant, Monday is the day to check.

Late night

233 restaurants in our data close at 11 p.m. or later on at least one night of the week, and 117 of those run past midnight. That second number is the one worth knowing: a Mexican restaurant is, in a large number of American cities, the only kitchen still open after midnight that is not a drive-through.

The late group is heavily skewed toward one format. Taquerías and counters make up most of it, because a griddle and a spit can serve a line at one in the morning with two people working and a full-service dining room cannot.

The ones that run latest

Sorted by their latest recorded closing time anywhere in the week. These are the hours in our data, not a guarantee: late hours change with the season and with staffing more than any other field in a directory.

The stores keep the longest hours of all

Mexican grocery stores in the US are open when nothing else is. Of the 511 stores where we hold hours, 501 open on Sunday and 482 open all seven days. 287 of them open at 7 a.m. or earlier on a weekday.

Those early hours exist for a reason: the customers are going to work. A store that opens at six and closes at ten serves people on both ends of a shift, and the bakery is baking before either. It also makes a Mexican supermarket the most reliable place to buy groceries on a Sunday evening in a lot of the country.

Opening time tells you what the place is for

The other end of the day is as informative as the closing time. A restaurant that opens at seven or eight in the morning is in the breakfast business — chilaquiles, huevos, barbacoa by the pound — and that is a different operation from one that unlocks at eleven for the lunch rush. In our data the early openers cluster in the border cities and in the metros with the oldest Mexican neighborhoods, which is exactly where you would expect a morning trade to exist.

Weekend openings shift too. A number of restaurants in our data open an hour or two earlier on Saturday and Sunday than on a weekday, which is the barbacoa-and-menudo pattern showing up in a database field. If a place opens at eight on Sunday and ten the rest of the week, that early Sunday hour is the one worth taking.

Holidays are the real gap

An hours field holds a weekly schedule and nothing else, so it cannot tell you about 12 December, Mother's Day, Christmas Eve or 2 November — four dates when a Mexican restaurant in the US may be closed for a family event, open for a special menu, or fully booked. Of those, 10 May and 2 November are the two that catch people out, and both are worth a phone call a week ahead.

What hours cannot tell you

Two honest limits. Weekend-only dishes do not appear in an hours field: a restaurant that sells barbacoa until it runs out on Sunday morning is recorded as open until nine at night, and by eleven the barbacoa is gone. And kitchens close before dining rooms do, sometimes by an hour.

We also hold no hours at all for 23 restaurants and 25 stores. Those are absent from every count on this page rather than counted as closed.

Using it

Every business page in our US restaurant directory and store directory shows the hours we hold, and the Google rating where Google has one. If you are heading out late, our guide to taquerías covers the format that stays open.

And for the Sunday dishes that drive all of this, our Red Pozole, Barbacoa Tacos and Beef Birria recipes are the three to know.