Which US States Our Directory Covers, and Which It Does Not

An honest map of our US coverage: 630 restaurants and 536 stores in 12 states, the metros we have mapped in depth, and the large gaps we have not.

A directory is only as useful as its honesty about where it is thin. Ours lists 630 active Mexican restaurants and 536 Mexican and Latin stores in the United States, across 186 cities and 12 states. The United States has fifty. This page is the map of what we have and what we do not.

What we cover, state by state

State	Restaurants	Stores	Total businesses	Restaurants with a Google rating
Texas	111	67	178	111 of 111
Florida	87	61	148	57 of 87
California	62	62	124	57 of 62
Georgia	59	51	110	32 of 59
Illinois	56	62	118	48 of 56
Arizona	56	54	110	36 of 56
Nevada	55	49	104	50 of 55
Washington	53	46	99	28 of 53
New York	42	40	82	42 of 42
North Carolina	33	35	68	1 of 33
Colorado	15	9	24	14 of 15
Connecticut	1	0	1	1 of 1

Texas leads, which is what you would expect. The real signal is in the comparison nobody would predict: California holds 124 businesses in our data, Georgia 110 and Washington State 99 — three figures that sit close together even though California's Mexican population dwarfs both. That is not a fact about the country. It is a fact about how far our mapping has gone in each place, and California is the most under-mapped large state we have.

The same caution applies in the other direction. Connecticut appears in the table with a single entry, which does not mean Connecticut has one Mexican restaurant; it means we have mapped one. Treat every row below as a floor, never a total.

The metros we have mapped in depth

Metro area	Restaurants	Stores
Chicago	41	30
Las Vegas	34	31
Phoenix	32	23
Houston	19	24
Seattle	23	13
Atlanta	25	10
Los Angeles	18	14
Dallas	20	12
Austin	22	9
Orlando	16	15
Miami	19	11
New York	18	11
San Antonio	17	12
San Francisco	18	7
San Diego	14	10
Denver	15	9
Tampa	15	7
Charlotte	9	10

The gaps, named

Thirty-eight states are absent from our US data entirely. The ones that matter most, because they have substantial Mexican communities and substantial Mexican food: New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama. We list nothing in any of them.

Portland, Oregon is the clearest single example, and worth naming because people ask. Our directory has 0 restaurants and 0 stores there — nothing at all. Portland has one of the better Mexican food scenes on the West Coast, built around a large Oaxacan community and a serious cart culture. Its absence from this site is a hole in our mapping, not a comment on the city, and writing a guide to it today would mean inventing the contents.

The same applies to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to Salt Lake City, to the Mexican food corridors of Detroit and Chicago's wider suburbs beyond what we list, and to the Hispanic communities across the rural Midwest that grew up around meatpacking. There is a lot of American Mexican food we have not mapped.

Where our coverage is thin inside the states we do have

Coverage is metro-weighted everywhere. We list 62 restaurants in California, which is obviously a fraction of what exists in a state where Mexican food is the default cuisine; our California entries are clustered in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, and we have barely touched the Central Valley, the Inland Empire or Orange County. New York State is 42 restaurants and 40 stores, almost all in the five boroughs.

Rural coverage is the weakest part. The one place we have deliberately mapped outside a metro area is the Yakima Valley in Washington, where the food exists because the farm work does. That pattern — Mexican communities built around agriculture rather than cities — repeats across the country and is almost entirely missing from our data.

What the blanks in our columns mean

Even within the businesses we list, fields are missing. 153 of the 630 restaurants have no Google rating in our data, 44 have no price level, and 23 have no hours. On the store side, 285 of 536 have no rating and 234 have no website.

We leave those blank rather than filling them. A directory that guesses a rating is worse than one that admits it does not have one, and every table on this site is built so that a missing value shows as a dash.

One more pattern in the gaps worth naming: they follow the age of the community, not its size. The states we have mapped deeply are the ones where Mexican migration arrived early enough to build a visible commercial corridor — a street with a supermarket, a bakery, two taquerías and a meat market within a few blocks. The states we are missing include several where the community is large but newer and more dispersed, so the businesses exist without a corridor to find them on. Those are harder to map and they are where the work is.

Why a gap is better than a guess

There is a temptation, running a directory, to fill a city with whatever a search engine returns and call it coverage. We have not done that, and the reason is visible the moment anyone uses it: an entry with a wrong address, stale hours or a business that closed two years ago costs a reader a trip, and one bad entry undermines the forty good ones around it. A city with nothing in it at least tells the truth.

It also matters for what we write. A city guide built from an empty table would have to invent its contents — neighborhoods, names, ratings — and that is the one thing a directory cannot do and remain a directory. So the cities on this site with a guide are the cities where the data came first.

How to help, and where to look meanwhile

If a business near you is missing, the store directory and restaurant directory are the two places to see what we already hold for your city. Both are filterable, and both show exactly which fields we have for each entry.

And if your city is one of the gaps, the cooking does not have to wait: our substitutions guide is written for exactly that situation, and Green Salsa needs four ingredients a conventional supermarket carries.