An unassuming restaurant sits at the corner of Stone Way and 45th ST in Wallingford. Set on the first floor of a medical building it’s easy to miss the Mexican restaurant known as Beso Del Sol.

It was nearly a year ago when I first tried Beso Del Sol for lunch; a few months later it would be happy hour. That happy hour would be the last time I visited until recently when I made the conscious effort to stop in for an early dinner. While there was only one table seated when I arrived, a large party of around eight people, I still found that I had to wait. Wait for someone to come to the front to greet me, wait for my server to come take my order and a longish wait for my food. It seems as though service would not be a highlight of this restaurant either.

With a slant toward Southwestern U.S. Mexican cuisine, Beso Del Sol featured many items in the fried or heavily sauced and topped-with-cheese variety, the kind of Mexican food I like. So I ordered one of the “house specials”, the Beso Del Sol Enchiladas ($11.55). What arrived were two standard enchiladas squeezed onto a plate between soupy, runny refried beans and some, quite surprisingly, tasty Mexican rice. The enchiladas were buried beneath a pool of rich red sauce and melted cheese. The sauce itself a chunky mix of spices, bits of tomato, onion and green chilies. As for the enchiladas, the corn tortillas had some good flavor but the cheese and olive filling left much to be desired. Just barely there the cheese oozed out almost immediately and the olives were missing from nearly every other bite. Surprisingly I found the Mexican rice to be the one standout of the meal. Fluffy and soft I contained tender bits of carrot and onion while just faintly seasoned with cilantro and tomato.

I think there is perhaps a reason why it took me nearly a year to return to Beso Del Sol. Reminiscent of a ChiChi’s restaurant from the 1980s, it seems as though the only winning points would be with Beso Del Sol’s happy hour. At least then you can have drinks to occupy yourself with while you wait for your food.