First Taste - Don't Call It Tex-Mex

Yellow Rose brings fresh flour tortillas, vegan queso, and a honky-tonk vibe to the East Village.

- By Adam Platt

WHETHER YOU’RE EATING a samosa in Jackson Heights or ingesting a bowl of noodles in one of the city’s many Chinatowns, dining out in New York has always provided the illusion of travel to faraway lands. Even now, when we’re all living in our tiny, ever-narrowing covid orbits, I would argue that this is still true. Just in the past few weeks, I’ve been teleported, briefly, to the duck houses of northern China (the “mandarin duck” at Milu) and the pizza temples of Naples (the classic margherita at Ribalta), so when news arrived, not long ago, of a newly opened Texan canteen called Yellow Rose on lower Third Avenue, I put on my wool cap and two layers of foul-weather gear and ambled over to the East Village to have a look.