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In the Tex-Mex world, there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of tortilla chips.
The first tortilla chip is what I’ll call the prefabricated one. You know it well. It comes in a few shapes, the most common of them being round. It is reliable, if unremarkable, and it is most common next to a cup of melted cheese, but it can sometimes sneak up next to other toppings, too. It’s a common sight at sports venues, carnivals, and restaurants where nachos are an afterthought on the menu. It’s also the mainstay of grocery stores.
The second tortilla chip is what I’ll call the homemade one. You may also know it well. It’s typically a triangle, and it’s primary habitat is the local Tex-Mex or Mexican restaurant in the United States. These chips are distinct from their prefabricated counterparts in terms of taste and texture, and in ways that are sometimes hard to explain but not hard at all to identify. They’re just better. You’re most likely to see them in that helping of chips and salsa that comes out first thing in the restaurant, and they’re also a popular sight for the member of your party who orders the deluxe nachos.
Grocery stores don’t really carry the second chip. Not really, but they do try. They call them “restaurant tortillas,” even if that’s a generous title. Our preferred attempt at such a chip — among what is available in our area — are the On the Border Tortilla Chips, which, while not as good as restaurant chips, have a better taste and texture than anything else we can find in a grocery store.
Aldi is all about the imitation game. It has a few options that are unabashedly clones of the first tortilla chip, all of them under the Clancy’s house brand. It also has something that is meant to look like the second tortilla chip, under the Pueblo Lindo label.
This is the story of the latter.
Pueblo Lindo Restaurant Tortilla Strips are an Aldi Regular Buy. That means they can be found at stores all the time. They come in a 24-ounce bag and currently cost $4.29, or about 17.8 cents an ounce. That’s lower than most chips that I can find at Walmart, including On the Border, which are currently around 23.5 cents an ounce.
A note about shape. These are advertised as tortilla strips but they should not be confused with the little strips you can buy to sprinkle on your salad. Instead, these are big strips that function like other tortilla chips. Also, Aldi used to sell a variation on these Pueblo Lindo chips that were triangles, but at the time of this writing those are not currently in our stores.
The chips contain three ingredients: ground corn, vegetable oil, and salt. The package also notes that, as far as allergens are concerned, the chips may contain milk and soy.
A one-ounce serving has 130 calories, 7 grams of fat, 0.5 grams of saturated fat, 90 milligrams of sodium, and 16 grams of carbohydrates. (As with any tortilla chip, good luck eating just the serving size.) These have enough calories, fat, and sodium that I prefer to eat them in moderation.
Nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)
Our testers found these to be passable, if unspectacular. The texture is a little crisper than our average store chip, but they’re not flaky in the way many of our restaurant chips are. The taste, meanwhile, is on the bland side: they aren’t entirely lacking taste, but they come off as more muted than other store chips. Our testers not only rated them below On the Border and other store “restaurant-style” chips, but they also felt like these came up short compared to other Aldi chips … Aldi chips that are, in some, cases, cheaper. Not a great vote of confidence for a specialty tortilla chip like this.
The Verdict:
Pueblo Lindo Restaurant Tortilla Strips are a decent, if not great, tortilla chip. While the price is competitive enough, our testers preferred some of Aldi’s other budget tortilla chips over these, primarily because of a taste that wasn’t bad but wasn’t all that memorable, either. They might look the part, but we didn’t think they tasted the part well enough to be worth getting again over other options.
