Tonight I met a couple of friends after work at Barrio at St. Paul.
I've been intrigued by this place since it opened, but the idea of going
to a tequilleria over the lunchhour has never won when we debate over
where to go for lunch. So when at the spur of the moment I was invited I
decided laundry and packing and anything else I had remotely planned to
do. And ultimately it was fun, despite some extremely awkward service
issues.
We arrived and the reservation we thought we had was
non-existant. Pretty much the hostess shrugged her shoulders and tried
to be accomodating . We ended up waiting at the bar. However part of the
issue is that the service was practically non-existant so that by the
time someone had paid enough attention to us, we were already able to
head to a table.
We all decided to go with the prixfix
meal/special. First to arrive was this super tasty corn. It had mexican
cheese sprinkled on it and a little reduced pepper sauce. There also was
a buttery garlic on the corn and I seriously could have eaten another
corn cob and been extremely happy. It was messy and corn tends to stick
in my teeth so to quote my friends - surely not a good date food.
Did
I mention the service was slow? Dont really know what our server had
going on but she surely had a bunch of excuses as to why our drinks were
taking a while...why the guac was taking a while...and when she did
attempt to stop at the table, it was just an interuption and often not
very genuinely helpful.
Their guac is very tasty. It has thinly
sliced radishes and jalapenos and comes in this ridiculous mortar and
pestal type bowl that just seemed too gimmicky and not really that
necessary.
The meal also came with several different types of
salsa and homemade chips (which seemed to have a sprinkling of lime/salt
on them.)
The main meal was tacos served family style. Chicken
and pork with soft taco shells and a rather pathetically small pile of
tomatos, limes, onions and cilantro. There were also some pinto beans
and some cilantro rice (which was a little under done) We sent the rice
back as it really had too many hard kernels. The chef offered to buy us
desert.
At this point my friends had finished their drinks but our
waitress was nowhere to be found. The other roving pseudo manager who
had already been more accomodating to us than our waitress offered to
get us drinks. Our waitress then finally came to our table but by then
it was too late. We asked to speak to a manger.
So my friend told
the manager of our story so far. The lost reservation was explained
away that the person answering the phone didn't know how to use the
reservation system and how he really was going to train them next week.
As we continued you could totally tell the manager had had other people
complain about this server. He was accomodating to us but somewhat
disloyal to his staff. Do you really tell a customer that their waitress
was going to only be working for another week? As if keeping someone
who clearly doesn't have joy in what they do is okay if you shrug your
shoulders. Anyhow thanks to our complaint, our meal was comped. Which
wasn't completely necessary but a nice offer.
The food was pretty good, the company was excellent and ultimately it might be someplace I might go again. 3 stars.
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