Tenoch Set to Open as Harvard Square’s Sixth Mexican Eatery

Massachusetts Mexican restaurant chain Tenoch has plans to open a new branch in Harvard Square at 83 Mount Auburn St in The Garage, according to the company’s website.

The new location fills a vacancy left by Las Palmas, which closed permanently in March less than five months after its grand opening. The space was also previously home to El Jefe’s Taqueria from 2015 to 2022 prior to the popular Mexican restaurant’s move into the Abbot Building in the Square.

Tenoch will join a robust lineup of Mexican food options near Harvard’s campus, including El Jefe’s, Felipe’s Taqueria, Achilito’s Taqueria, the Painted Burro, and Más Veggies Vegan Taqueria. Its menu will boast a wide selection of tortas, burritos, quesadillas, enchiladas, and tacos.

Though Tenoch has earned a loyal following at six other restaurants in Greater Boston for its traditional Mexican flavors — and has dispatched a food truck periodically to the Science Center Plaza — its permanent arrival in the Square stirred mixed reactions among Cambridge locals and Harvard students.

With several established restaurants serving a variety of traditional Mexican dishes, some locals questioned whether there’s room for another player in the Square’s market.

Kelly Coveney, a local Cambridge resident, said there are “too many Mexican restaurants,” even before Tenoch’s opening.

“You can’t have more than two of any kind anywhere because it gets redundant,” she said, adding that too many of any kind of restaurant is “not good for business.”

John S. Kato, a Harvard Square resident since 1978, said Tenoch — a chain restaurant — is a symbol of a longer-running shift in Cambridge dining away from family-owned restaurants.

“A lot of the stores in Harvard Square now have become the result of franchise operations,” Kato said, adding that it “takes away from the local Cambridge culture of Harvard Square the way it used to be in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.”

Faced with economic disruptions stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of longstanding Harvard Square businesses closed permanently. Most notably, Cambridge coffee Chain Darwin’s Ltd. closed permanently in 2022, ending 30 years of business operations.

Yasmin Zamdomenico, a teaching assistant in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard, said Tenoch’s opening contributes to the variety of Mexican food options in the area, noting that “the community of Spanish speakers is so big here in Massachusetts, just like the Portuguese as well.”

Annabelle D. Brooks ’27 agreed, saying she is “positively thrilled.”

“I am so happy that there is yet another option for burritos,” she added.

—Staff writer Mandy Zhang can be reached at mandy.zhang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @mandyzhang08.