Costa Vida Fresh Mexican Grill — Restaurant in American Fork

My husband and I love Costa Vida and go admittedly too frequently, haha! The food is always great, the staff is competent and quick, and we love that you can order online and easily pickup. Anyone who tells you that "other" restaurant is better is nuts; Costa Vida wins, hands down. I also really love the limeade they have!

The thing they could do better/fix has everything to do with their app for their points system; it's kind of awful, imo. I particularly am irritated with the ridiculousness that surrounds online ordering and their app and points. For back information, the app works to record your points earned by having you scan in your receipt's barcode within 48 hours of dining with them. The app also happens to have a feature that allows you to order online. Well when you order online, you receive an emailed receipt and a printed receipt at the store with your order information. Neither of these receipts (the emailed one nor the printed one) have a barcode to scan. Even if you order directly from the app! So the only way to have your points added is to email your receipt to them and have their customer service enter it in manually. That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of and had to do. It shouldn't be hard to program the app to automatically input online orders placed through the app and your account. The fact that I had to email in about it and be told I'd have to continue emailing my receipts to have online order points added is honestly kind of stupid. I realize this issue isn't this specific location's issue though, but rather corporate's issue, which is why this doesn't effect my 5...

*update: corporate office responded by taking me seriously, and taking responsibility. They've done what they could to make it right.

We ordered a meal for everyone in our seven person household today, and picked it up at curbside. The food was held securely in laps on the short drive home. At home, we discovered the food was poorly thrown together, with tortillas completely soaked in beans, and soggy as a result. Portion sizes differed greatly from one meal to the next, with one meal having only a tiny scoop of refried beans, and another tray absolutely flooded with them.

It got worse. Beans and rice is probably my favorite part of the meal. My first mouth full of beans had something mysterious and hard in it, that wasn't visible when I put it in my mouth. When I pulled it out of my mouth, I discovered it was a coiled up piece of fine wire. My best guess is that it was the remnants of a wire twist tie, and that the paper that used be around the wire was disintegrated into the beans. Notwithstanding the danger of potentially swallowing jagged wire, it also completely ruined my meal. I couldn't stomach eating food that hadn't been handled properly. For what we spent here, the standard for quality should've been much, much higher. We've been eating here for years, and never had a complaint. As bad as this experience was, we won't...

To their credit, the staff has always been very friendly, and the taste of the food is great. We've been there almost weekly over the last few months, and unfortunately, this location has messed up on our order nearly every time. We have severe dairy allergies in our family, and we always specifically ask for no cheese, rice, or tomatillo dressing because of that. Yet, the staff still include any combination of all of those things anyways (even when we have asked them to double-check the order to make sure). Today everything looked great with our order at first- Until we got home, and my wife started eating her salad and realized there was literally NO meat, and that there was RICE when we had requested no rice. Allergic reactions then followed, resulting in my wife's airway closing off due to accidentally taking a bite with rice in it. Very disappointed in this Costa Vida location.

UPDATE: 9/20/22 We've been about a dozen times since I posted the first review, and there's been no fix to this issue. For some odd reason, the drive thru workers get it wrong every single time when we ask for no cheese. To Costa Vida credit, they are happy to replace the incorrect product, but it's clear that the issue is not being discussed...