People who live on the south side of Fargo will tell you Luna has been one of the more quietly reliable dinner spots for years. That’s not a knock — reliable is what you want when the temperature drops to twelve below and you don’t feel like driving far.
Luna sits on 45th Street South, in a stretch of Fargo that doesn’t get a lot of ink. The strip-mall surroundings are not inspiring from the parking lot. Go anyway. The room inside is warm and dim in the right way — booths along one wall, a bar that actually gets used, and enough noise that a conversation at normal volume doesn’t feel weird. On a rainy Tuesday in October, when I last went, the place was maybe two-thirds full by six o’clock, which in Fargo on a weeknight is genuinely busy.
The menu runs Mexican-American with some Tex-Mex crossover — enchiladas, fajitas, carnitas, that kind of territory. Nothing is trying to reinvent anything. What it is doing is executing the basics at a level that a lot of places in this price range don’t bother with. The tortilla chips come out fresh and warm, salted just right. The salsa has actual heat to it without being a stunt. I’ve been ordering the carne asada plate for three years running and I have not gotten tired of it: thin-sliced beef, charred at the edges, served with rice and beans and handmade tortillas that are soft enough to fold without cracking.
The margaritas are worth ordering. They do them on the rocks, with real lime, and they’re not stingy with the pour. A house margarita runs around nine or ten dollars, which is reasonable for Fargo. The horchata is also good — thick, cold, properly sweet — if you’re skipping alcohol.
Service is attentive without being hovering. The staff knows the menu. If you ask what’s good, they’ll actually tell you something specific instead of saying everything is.
Dinner for two with drinks runs roughly forty to fifty-five dollars before tip, depending on how many rounds you do. There are cheaper places to eat Mexican food in Fargo, and a couple that are more ambitious, but Luna lands in a useful middle ground: consistent, affordable, not precious about itself.
The lunch crowd skews toward office workers and contractors from the surrounding neighborhoods. Dinner pulls in more couples and small groups. Weekend nights — Friday especially — it fills up faster than you’d expect, and they don’t take reservations, so getting there before six-thirty is the move.
If you’re staying downtown and don’t have a car, this one probably isn’t for you. But if you’ve got wheels and you’re done with the same four blocks of Broadway, a twenty-minute drive south for a solid plate of carne asada and a cold margarita is a reasonable way to spend an evening. Luna isn’t making any noise about itself, and it doesn’t need to.
