Around nine on a Friday, the bar stools at The Matador are occupied by the kind of Tacomans who’ve been coming here long enough to have a drink. The place runs along Sixth Avenue in the stretch between the University of Puget Sound crowd and the older neighborhood regulars who were here before the newer spots moved in. It is loud in the way a Mexican restaurant with a serious tequila program should be loud — not unpleasant, just alive.
The building is a converted older commercial space, nothing ornate, the kind of place that earns its atmosphere through repetition rather than renovation. Strings of lights, dark wood, taxidermy that would feel ironic somewhere else but here just feels like decoration. The booths fill up fast on weekends. The long bar does steady business all night.
The menu runs deeper than most people expect from a place that gets described primarily as a bar. The queso fundido arrives in a small cast iron pan, molten and slightly charred at the edges, meant to be scooped with thick corn tortillas. The green chile chicken enchiladas are the kind of plate that requires a decision about whether to eat dinner elsewhere first or just commit. Most people who know the place commit. The chips come out hot, the salsa is house-made and has actual heat to it, and the guacamole is fine if overpriced, which is the cost of ordering guacamole anywhere in 2024.
The tequila and mezcal list is genuinely extensive — not curated for trend-chasers, but deep in the way that suggests someone did real work assembling it. A margarita here runs around twelve to fourteen dollars depending on what goes into it. Happy hour, which runs weekdays in the late afternoon, is worth knowing about: drink prices drop and the bar fills with a different crowd, quieter, mostly people stopping in after work.
On the night in question, a table near the back is celebrating something — a birthday or a promotion or just a Friday — and the noise level rises accordingly. Nobody seems to mind. The bartender moves without wasted motion, working four orders simultaneously. The server who brings a second round of chips does so without being asked.
Sixth Avenue has changed considerably over the past decade. Places have opened, closed, changed hands. The Matador has remained more or less what it was, which in a neighborhood full of concepts and pivots is its own kind of achievement. It is not trying to be anything other than a Mexican restaurant and bar that takes its tequila seriously and keeps the kitchen running late. For a significant portion of Tacoma, that is exactly sufficient.
Parking along Sixth Avenue on a weekend night means walking a couple of blocks, which is fine. The nearest cross streets are Alder or Sprague depending on which direction you approach from. The kitchen stays open until eleven most nights, later on weekends. For the neighborhood, The Matador functions less like a destination and more like a standing arrangement — the kind of place people end up at because they’ve ended up there before and it hasn’t let them down.
