Puebla Minimarket

Incredible tortas densely packed with delicious ingredients. If you're a vegetarian, try the stuffed chile relleno torta and balance its slight greasiness out with one of their fine juices. Very pleasant staff as well.

I love this place people who never came before just has to come

Great tortas and smoothies! Awesome place!

Best tortas. Mostly meat, cheese and grease heavy, but also have excellent veggie grilled poblano torta. Unappatising seats in back of store, try to go orders. (when i ordered a hot sandwich at green fig around the corner once, the worker there told me to come here, to Puebla, instead).

This review is for Tortas A La Plancha Don Pepe. Like many other bodegas/mini markets, the restaurant is in the back.

After reading the Village Voice's review about this place, I knew I had to try it.

Now I'm not going to go as far into depth as the Voice reporter did, nor am I going to reiterate. That's just pointless. But what I will do is say that I think the Voice speaks a bit too highly of the place. And before I get into its shortcomings, let me say right now that the torta was pretty good. In many places, this would probably be an amazing torta, and something worth going out of your way for. But here in the Sunset Park/South Slope area, it didn't win me over.

Bread - I believe that tortas should have a nice, soft roll. Maybe a little bit crusty on the outside, but be very easy to bit through and soak up some of the flavor of the torta, and be griddled. Don Pepe's bread is pressed in a machine, similar to how a Cuban sandwich is done. Nothing wrong with that in the abstract, but it's now how I want my torta.

Mess - The torta was also too neat. There were very distinct layers of the torta. It was almost like a torta parfait. Some people like this kind of cooking, but I subscribe to the torta theory of "If It doesn't get all over the place, it doesn't belong in your face".

Carne Asada - The end of it was a bit tough. They served it in as a long piece, which works if it's high quality beef, but what I got was simply average.

I also tried a taco al pastor, which was good, though pretty greasy.

Again, I know I sound harsh, but when a place gets the "best" title thrown at it, I felt it necessary to deflect.