La Margarita: Slightly Upscale Mexican

La Margarita Restaurant and Tequila Bar just recently opened in the heart of Fountain Square at Virginia Avenue and Woodlawn Avenue (part of the old GC Murphy Building).  It has a trendy, comfortable decor and  quite a selection of tequilas behind the bar, of which I was unable to sample any because it was lunchtime and I was working, dangit! We were immediately presented with tortilla chips and three different salsas:  a pureed spicy tomato sauce similar to other restaurant's salsas, a spicy green tomatillo salsa that I found to really delicious, and a watery kind of pico de gallo that was good but hard to keep on the chips.  The chips themselves were thick, hard, and crunchy, so much so that I got a fragment stuck in my gum, but it did have good flavor, right up until I pried the chip shrapnel out with a drink straw....  I had the lunch special quesadilla & tortilla soup combo and the Little Woman ordered a taco salad.  The quesadilla was a little smaller than I expected and the outside was a toasty brown, also unexpected but quite tasty.  The tortilla soup was a little bland for my taste, compared to say, Don Pablo's (maybe La Margarita's is more true Mexican-- most of the food I had in Mexico had more subtle flavors than the way they're presented in the US).  The taco salad had very fresh greens and was in a pastry bowl that, like my quesadilla, was more browned than we're used to, but it was nevertheless tasty.  At $7.25, lunch was moderately tasty and not a bad deal, but it didn't provide the giant mounds of food you usually get at your run-of-the-mill Mexican restaurants.  If we go back it will likely be just for a tequila tasting....  !Andale!