Bad Bean Baja Grill

Great service, fantastic food. I had the best taco salad EVER. My whole family loved the food. We will be back next summer!

I wanted a quick bite and this was the place! I sat at the bar and got the beer special, some Mexican beer for $ 2. For $ 2, you really can’t go wrong. The bartender also got me some chips and salsa (you chose the salsa, mild, med, or hot, I got medium). Chips were fresh and warm. Both chips and salsa were great. One mild annoyance, you get one smallish plate of salsa… you have to pay for additional salsa, no charge for more chips. I asked the bartender if he’d recommend the quesadilla or tacos. He said, tacos. The taco order is basically a la carte, so I ordered one brisket and one mahi taco. Both were delicious! Next time I’m in town, I’ll be back to try more on the menu!

I haven’t had a bad meal yet. Impeccable dishes. You can’t make these meals at home. In my book it’s a home run.

I was just tired. Tired, Tired, Tired of seafood after being in OBX for a few days. I was turned on to this place by the hotel and if that hot Puerto Rican would let me I would kiss her. This place has some of the best takes on Mexicali you can find. Their homemade salsa is the best and the service was on point. I had the shredder and it was a feast for men so no women allowed. The guacamole was fresh and on point and the margarita tasted homemade without any store bought mix.
Don’t decide to come to this place. Understand that you need to taste this place with every molecule of your soul. That’s right fellow humans I’ve brought metaphysics into this experience.

Brisket taco was great. The mahi mahi fish taco was amazing; Extremely fresh fish! Blue berry mojito and blueberry margarita were strong and served in the wrong glassware, but were tasty. Sauce on the smothered chicken burrito was really good. Grilled chicken, bacon, and avocado wrap was a nice menu option and really good! Good atmosphere and excellent service; knowledgeable and prompt. Highly recommend…

So happy they moved. LOVE the new space and the food is still just as awesome!!! We went 3 times last year and had amazing food every time. They have been consistent this time as well. All the tacos are great but I always go with pork belly special, brisket taco and it never disappoints. My husbands favorite is the Cali burrito. The smaller size is pretty big and the larger one is perfect size for 2 to share. The Fresca salsa is my favorite, but I heard the spicier ones are also great (just a wimp when it comes to spice). Margaritas are also fresh and taste really good without any of that gross mix taste… And their guacamole is also pretty good Was happy to visit the new location and it got very busy on a Tuesday night… So I am sure it will be packed on weekends and when season is in full swing!

Absolutely fabulous food and experience, best food on the OBX. Dip platter was a great way to start and you simply cannot miss the jalapeño popper like egg rolls, amazing! The Shredder proved to be the best bite of the evening with the burnt cheddar cheese curds and fries inside the wrap. Will definitely return whenever we visit!

This place is pretty great! Looks fairly new, very clean, super nice wait staff! The pork belly taco and calamari taco are out of this world! Also tried the Ancho braised beef brisket and shredded pork Barbacoa, both equally delish! Had a strawberry margarita, super fresh strawberry taste and good alcohol content! A new must stop for us when visiting OBX!

Pork belly taco. Enough said.
But if you need more, great service, great drinks, and awesome tacos. New spot has a funky, fun décor and is very clean and comfy.
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Twice in one week. Went for the pork belly taco again, and the pork barbacoa and again they didn’t disappoint.

This place was great. We stopped here to eat on our way in to OBX. I had a barbacoa pork taco and a brisket taco. They were both delicious and I had a Stone IPA with it. Great food!!!

I have been a fan since it replaced Coastal Cactus, at Seagate North. Now it has moved north a few miles and has been open a month. Fresh tacos with various fillings, burritos (one 15 inch?), and other mex items. I had a flounder on potato salad for dinner and it may have been the best meal of this trip. The space doesn’t have the character of the old location, and the service is spotty (a margarita ordered mid meal showed up at meals end, and no crowd to blame). I will attribute this to their working the kinks out.

Delicious! Love the pork belly taco, and the skirt steak burrito was amazing!
The salsa and chips, as well as the shrimp tacos were quite salty.
Cute place, great service … Next time burrito all way.

Food was fantastic and the server was friendly and quick with everything. I really enjoyed this place.

A must go to restaurant for my family when we’re in the OBX. The Tex-​Mex menu doesn’t disappoint. The fish tacos are a must as well as their house margarita.

Very good food, nice margarita’s. Just the right amount of funky. Extremely helpful waitress.
What more do you need

Had a Stone IPA draft beer and a pork Cali burrito. Burrito was big and very tasty. They offer a round of complimentary chips and salsa and the salsa was very good. And they have a good beer selection. Wish I had discovered the place sooner.

The SOUPS! Wish they made their soups year round, their soups are always so good. My favorite is the roasted garlic potato and the smoky tomato bisque! Mmmmmm. The tacos are unlike any others on the beach, and I waiver between the shredded beef (has a taste reminiscent of Christmas, with some allspice or something in there which is unique and very tasty), & the chicken. No ground-​burger tacos here! My husband loves the tofu tacos, and he’s not even vegetarian! (He also likes the pork belly tacos, haha) The quesadillas are equally good, and The Shredder burrito (sliced steak, griddled cheese curds, garlic fries in a wrap topped with a delicious red enchilada-​type sauce) is about the naughtiest, most delicious thing ever. Ask anyone! No wonder they’ve won so many food awards locally… Bad Bean Baja Grill always delivers tasty food fast, and we eat lunch or dinner here several times a week so that’s saying something.

We needed a break from seafood and barbecue, so decided to try some Mexican. BBBG looked interesting, based on some Unilocal photos and a menu review. We started with two pretty decent salsas. There was a green, tomatillo based version with a lot of onion. It was billed as having roasted poblano, but none was really evident. The red had good flavor of habanero with good sweet/​tart balance and nice heat. The chips served with these were very salty.
I ordered an appetizer of albondigas which our server mispronounced every time he said it. These were made of pork and had a tender texture. They rested on a bed of plastic pellet rice (read Uncle Ben’s or similar) and topped with a sauce that was supposed to have some chipotle that was also absent. What was present though was cumin, lots and lots of cumin. I rate the meat balls as 3 stars but they would jump to 4−½ without the over use of cumin. A little would be OK, but here we have an amateur in the kitchen who thinks that cumin makes it Mexican and a lot of cumin makes it a lot Mexican.
Ms T ordered grilled chicken in a wrap with avocado and bacon. Heavy handed use of bacon masked all other flavors in the filling. This is another example of the over use of one ingredient. You might as well just order bacon and drop the pretense that it is something else. Bacon is good, we all agree, but when included in dishes we should try to allow something else to be tasted. Ms T picked out at least a half cup of bacon and still had plenty. The wrapper that makes this a wrap was herb and garlic and garlic and garlic and garlic. I could smell it from across the table and asked her where the garlic was coming from. She assumed it was the filling but quickly figured out it was the flour tortilla. She removed the offending wrapper and ate the filling. There were fries with this. Perhaps these are what are known around here as beach fries. We have something similar a couple of times. These are also heavily seasoned with garlic.
I ordered a nightly special of Grilled Meat Loaf. So that gives you an idea of the creativity being attempted here. It’s not often you can choose meatloaf in a Mexican place. It was served on grits which were surrounded by pumpkin seed mole. I liked the coarse style grits. The mole was richly flavored, but also overloaded with cumin and garlic. It was very, very salty and could not be enjoyed without the neutral grits to temper them. You had to eat the meatloaf, grits and mole all together. The meatloaf was not highly seasoned, but was grilled well, forming a good crust. This dish was OK but someone needs to relieve the chef of his drums of ground cumin and crates of garlic.
There is creativity at Bad Bean and that is not a bad thing. The ideas are good. It is nice to have some Mexican influenced options that are not so predictable. There is however, no finesse in the dishes we had. With the introduction of the salsas I thought this was promising but was disappointed with the clumsy main fare. Weak three stars. Three stars means A-​OK but this was Just-​OK.

For some unknown reason, I was given an attitude and was rushed out by nearly all servers in the Corolla area of the Outer Banks. But this place was the worst. Our server kept trying to push us out: she constantly came to our table asking if we were done and tried taking plates away that still had food. Forget about her offering us dessert. She was glad when we left. I just couldn’t figure out why we were treated this way when there was no one else in the restaurant; it’s not like they needed open tables!
Anyway, the food was still okay. We got the dip sampler. I like how basic their salsa and guacamole are. I then got the «Callie» wrap with grilled tofu, onions, greens, guacamole, and cheese. It was good but the tofu wasn’t marinated (as the menu states) and the cheese wasn’t melted. The cilantro-​garlic fries were good but a little too garlicky. I am not a fan of garlic so I would have preferred another choice for a side. My sister got a burrito and it was served wrapped in tin foil, as if she ordered it to go. What a failure on presentation and again speaks to my complaint that they were trying to get us out of there.

The Bad Bean Baja Grill is a Mexican restaurant that puts their own spin on classic recipes. Aside from the fact that their salsa is homemade, the food is amazing!
Although most reviews said to try the pork belly tacos, my family and I don’t eat red meat. Instead, we opted for other interesting and delicious choices.
To start off, my parents got a classic margarita which they seemed to enjoy. My dad ordered the portobello mushroom and goat cheese quesadilla, my mom got a mahi mahi taco, and I ordered one chicken taco and one black bean and rice taco.
Each of the meals were prepared perfectly, but I would not get the black bean and rice taco because the beans seemed a little off for my taste. But every other meal (that I took a nibble of) was made close to perfection.