Santo Cantina & Cocina — Restaurant in Avondale Estates

Food 5/5, Drinks 5/5, Decor 5/5 - Sadly, they need to fire their front of house manager. He is passive aggressive and never spoke to my party of 15 once, instead he argued with our waitress within eyesight of our table and made her deliver all bad news and handle our requests/complaints. "They can't split checks on parties larger than 6" never came up until we were into several rounds of drinks and apps. Despite the fact that we were seated at two separate tables at different times. What about that is not or cannot be considered two tables? AND I came in the Friday before specifically to chat with the owner and manager, welcome them to the neighborhood, and ask if they could accommodate a group on Valentine's Monday. What's inexcusable is when the waitress took our confusion back to the manager he argued with her in eyesight of our table at length and sent her back to lie and claim we had been informed prior to being seated. The whole thing was really awkward and we ended up eating guac, french fries, and soup instead of ordering proper entrees and spending A LOT more money, because no one wanted a $1k bill. We were told "don't worry about it, we'll sort it out."

We finally convinced them to at least split the literal separate tables into two checks...the second table had only 5 people at it and by their own rules they should have been able to split that check, so it was increasingly obvious that the manager just didn't want the waitress to consider us separate parties. From a revenue perspective, I don't get this at all? I guess you're protecting your server by guaranteeing her 18% tip, but we even pointed out we had no issue with that and we usually leave more on top of 18%...Again, manager never spoke to us. We even had kitchen staff running the few things we ordered to our table, probably because the waitress needed a break so she wouldn't have a meltdown. Been there.

Having worked service industry I know the difference when a manager should empower wait staff to enforce policies and when they should take over the situation. He gets paid more than her for these exact situations and again it was totally passive aggressive. I wish they would have simply turned me/us away when I asked about a large party, but don't worry we got the message! ...I think they even turned the outdoor heaters off half way through our meal...

To top it all off the special was 1/2 off wine and they charged us full price, despite pointing this out twice to be corrected. I just gave up and paid it to get...

Think of a good, old-fashioned American style Mexican restaurant. The comfort of the familiar dishes and scents. Yeah, the food may be a bit boring and heavy, but feel very at home from the moment you sit down. Somehow this place manages to keep 100% of that comfort while taking the experience to the next level and raising the quality of the food. And they do it without slipping into being pretentious (no "tacos made with our own bespoke chicken breed and finished with gold leaf and bee pollen imported from Holland"). It is kind of hard to explain how they have done it. Basic things like queso and light flaky corn chips and baja fish tacos just seem better quality. Even the refried beans - which I normally avoid, but they came with the dish - were less heavy and more flavorful. Everything was just fresher and more inviting. These folks definitely proved themselves on the basics, so next time I will probably pick something more adventurous from the menu. And the drinks - a spicy margarita and a mezcal margarita (don't remember the names). In a world full of overly sweet bottled sour mix these were proper cocktails - balanced between sweet and sour, and I am a big fan of mezcal so I loved it with the smoky notes. The atmosphere is not going to impress anyone. If you are looking for fine dining this isn't the place for that. But at the same time it isn't depressing or generic. It isn't a converted Applebees by a long shot. It is ... casually interesting I guess. For the record, we dined on the covered patio on a relatively not cold (I wouldn't call it warm) February evening and with the heaters found it quite comfortable. Not that everything is perfect. They are still working out service a bit - things got a little confused in terms of who ordered what. But the servers seemed new and really did seem to be doing their best - nothing I imagine won't get worked out with a little time and experience. And on a Friday dinner they were very busy - it looked like they could have taken over the vacant space next door and filled it no problem. But in case you can't tell, we will...

Pros: it’s a cool-looking place, and house margaritas are half off on Tuesdays.

Let me preface this by saying my partner and I have both worked in the industry for about a decade, and we both really wanted to like this place.

We were greeted by the host, who ended up being the only person who seemed to pay any attention to us the entire time we were there. After several minutes (the table sat immediately before us already had their drinks and appetizers), the host left her stand to find someone to serve us because all the serves had ignored us.

We finally had someone bring us water, and slowly were brought chips and salsa and eventually able to order drinks and the queso fundido. At this point we had been there for half an hour and hadn’t even been asked our order, so when the server finally returned we asked for the check; a process which also took about 10 minutes.

Aside from the abysmal service (we never got the server’s name, but it didn’t seem like he’s ever done it before), the salsa was decent, the chips were way too thin, and the queso tasted like it came from a jar. The margaritas were much too sweet for us, but were fine for $4. It sounds dramatic, but our experience really ruined what had otherwise been...