San Marcos Mexican Restaurant - Burlington — Restaurant in Burlington

Warning! My wife became Violently ill after eating here yesterday. She went to sleep last night and woke up still sick!

As we have eaten here before without such negative effects, I feel the need to give a fair review this restaurant.

A Warning to all Diners eating anywhere!

First, as someone who used to be a chef at a number of restaurants throughout the southeast, I want to talk about timing and food service. If you have worked in the service industry you may want to skip this, as you probably know it. Most restaurants have an arranged schedule for food prep and cooking/baking. For lunch and dinner these times are usually around 11:00am - 2:00pm for lunch, and 4:30pm - 7:00pm for dinner, give or take. This leaves a dead zone where restaurants don't get much business around 2:30pm -4:00pm. This is where there is no real food left from lunch rush and prep for dinner isn't ready or finished. If you order food during this time, you may be rolling the dice. In my kitchen's if you order at this time, I would go into the fridge and/or freezer acquire the components for your meal, then prep and prepare it from scratch. (Which is what I'd expect from any decent place). It may take me longer and give me more work but, I cooked for people to love the food not to push them out the door. Unfortunately, a lot of restaurants don't do this. If you order during their dead time, you will get old leftovers from the lunch rush or worse last night's dinner. Or your food may be prepared from ingredients that have been sitting out for hours. In any case, this is when we ordered. I can speculate my wife's food poisoning is from the latter. (Trust me, not the first restaurant to pull the same tactic, and have the same result from us). It's actually sad. We will never return because we cannot risk getting sick for a quick meal.

The Actual Review:

Ignoring my previous statement I will give my honest opinion:

I love the exterior "sunny villa" look. This is what drew us into checking this place out. On the same token, the interior has great interior design, featuring ancient native american statues, varying styled wallpapers, and ornate ironwork. On to the food. In all, the food has good flavor and they don't serve bagged nacho chips. On the downside, I feel it's overpriced for what you get. (But, food is like art. If you feel it's worth the money for your liking, then go for it).

Every dish I have gotten here seems to be lacking on some level. Every time, either of our dishes came with tomatoes, we have gotten a half of a slice of tomato. A small Roma tomato at that. Just enough to prove that it had tomato. Also, every dish I had, that other Restaurants sell, seemed to be less then the others. i.e., I have order a Fajita Quesadilla from many restaurants that carry it. Their's was small and dry comparison. Most of the others I have had, regardless of size, had melted queso and sauce drizzled on it. This one has none and is skimpy on the filling. My taco salad had soft, slimy lettuce in it and the infamous Single half of tomato slice. The beef was soupy and resembled baby food. On the other hand, the flour tortilla bowl it came in was amazing.

I gave it two stars because of the sickness and slack details I just discussed. If not for the sickness I would have at least gave it a three star average. In truth, I feel this place is, good back of house upgrade, from becoming amazing. Unfortunately, we can't risk sickness to ever find out if...

Loved this place when it first opened but it’s quickly gone down hill. The atmosphere is the only good thing left about this place. My husband and I came here for a date night, our first in a while. We were seated quickly but waited 12 minutes to be acknowledged by a waitress who clearly didn’t want to be there. We ordered drinks and our food bc we had so much time. We got cheese dip before our silverware, drinks and chips and salsa so we sat there with nothing on the table but cheese dip. Ask the waitress for chips and silverware once again and she was irritated told us we’d get silverware when it became available. Our food came out, fajitas and still no silverware. The waitress came back with attitude and handed us plastic utensils for our meal!!!!!!!!!! For one common sense says get off your butt and clean some silverware but also anyone who’s worked in restaurants knows those dishwashing machines work fast so no excuse as long as we waited. We told the manager immediately and he acted inconvenienced and said he couldn’t get the workers to roll the silverware, well again common sense says he clearly doesn’t know how to manage his staff or take the position upon himself bc as manager he should have handled it. It’s a shame this place has turned into something ghetto that I wouldn’t waste my money on, truly appalling service and experience, I will never ever visit here again and I would never recommend this place to anyone again,...

It has been a while since we have been to San Marcos, and now I remember why we stopped going. We had to wait about 15 minutes to be seated, which was no problem. We had a server named Karol that came over relatively quick. We ordered our drinks and guacamole then put in our order. Food took about 30-35 minutes which was crazy because it wasnt that busy AND other larger tables around us were getting food before us.

But it was after the food came out that it started to get disappointing. A food runner delivered our food and we didnt see our server. At this point, my boyfriend has been out of beer for a while and wanted another one. I got up and started to look around for someone to ask and it was then she miraculously she came out of the back. He ordered another one and when she dropped it off, she literally dropped it and ran off without a word. He knew instantly it wasnt the beer he ordered and we had to wait until she came back out to say anything. She got the right beer after that but we had to wait for her to come back around our table and ask for everything after that: boxes and the check. When she dropped everything off it was quick and she didn't even speak.

I will not take away the fact that the food was delicious, but we will definitely be taking our business elsewhere, where the staff is friendlier and we don't have to walk our server...