Taco Flats-Riata — Restaurant in Austin

The food was okay, nothing spectacular. Everything was a bit on the spicy side, so be prepared for that (Even the chips and guac). The food was a bit on the pricey side and also served on paper plates (as opposed to actual plates that you would wash).

What I primarily have a difficult time stomaching (no pun intended) Is requiring customers to scan a QR code to order their food and not interacting with them outside of that. I can understand if the restaurant is incredibly big and or super popular, but it's a small strip mall restaurant and when I went in, hardly anyone was even eating there in the first place.

I only ever interacted with my waitress twice; the first time was her telling me that all the food is ordered through the QR code, and the second was to bring my food out. No drink refills, no checking on the quality of the food, none of that. So I have a hard time justifying a 18% - 25% tip (and it didn't seem to give the option for a custom tip despite selecting that choice on the app) when the serving staff are allowed to get away with the absolute bare minimum. Asking for a tip of that amount that should only come with full service like regular restaurants. It just seems to allow restaurants to get incredibly lazy with their service, since my waitress was in the back doing anything but serving me, and the bartender was sitting there watching sports instead of checking on customers. And let's not even get into what may happen if someone shows up without a smartphone. Maybe they don't have one, or maybe they forgot it. But how do you wind up serving those customers? Point is, QR code seem to be noticeably making customer service lazy and poor, while demanding full service tips. It's getting ridiculous.

I thought the food here was just okay, but it was that very "hands off and give the bare minimum amount of service" approach that I simply can't say that I was a fan of. Even the food was served in those little paper containers, which tells me they aren't even bothering to wash dishes. For that reason, I can't say I'll be coming...

We were disappointed with this latest experience. My wife and I have been going to Taco Flats as one of our favorite date night locals for over 8 years. Now that we have kids, getting out on a date night is extra special so we really want it to go well. We decided to go to this Taco Flats location because it was a little closer to home. It was a Friday, late afternoon about 5:00 by the time we got there. There were about 12 people inside and one server. We waited 10 minutes and I finally got up and asked for some water, this was after ordering our margaritas and guac using the QR code on the table, which I guess you're expected to do nowadays, instead of ordering from a server. So, the server finally came over and I said "We ordered some margaritas and some guac a while ago". She checks the kitchen and grabs our chips and guac which I guess were sitting there for a while. I see her quickly make the margaritas and bring them over to us. I asked her "Did you include a floater on the frozen one". She said, "I put a floater in there". I said, "Well isn't a floater supposed to float? Where is it?" It looked very watered down and slightly frozen. So she grabs another shot, bring it over to the table and pours it in the drink, which it instantly dissolves into the water. I gave up at this point. The tacos still tasted very good. We'll give the Burnet location one more try, but I won't be wasting a valuable date...

Tacos were OK. Atmosphere and food seems comparable to Tacodeli or Torchys but being asked to "put a card on file" before even placing an order seemed very odd and backwards. When I first sat down at noonish it seemed like there was only one person to handle all tables and the bar so service was a bit delayed. Instead of finally coming over to take my order, they demanded to swipe my card first. Shortly after that I did see one other employee helping folks so don't know if just got there or was on a break earlier.

All in all I thought the tacos were decent but were greasy/wet like they didn't sufficiently drain the meat of its oily broth so it was running down my hand and arm when holding to eat.

Green salsa was pretty good but didn't see any salt available on the bar or nearby tables.

Now I am stuck thinking I better monitor my card for unexpected charges since...