Cantina 76 — Restaurant in Columbia

Our welcome at the front door was amazing and our server, a sweet spirit. While very disappointed, I hope this review is recognized as encouragement to your kitchen staff. Note, the restaurant was not busy at the time of my visit. I encourage your chef to taste food before sending it out. The salsa was bitter that came with our chips. My son ordered the chimichanga. The breading was very heavy, over cooked, poor portion and the contents within were small. 75 % of the chimichanga was breading. I ordered three tacos. Fish taco, well over cooked and portion was embarrassing. Second taco was chicken teriyaki. Chicken over cooked and dry. Portion again seemed as if I was getting leftovers from a previous order. The third taco followed suit of the first two. A chef should taste the food the kitchen is producing. The expeditor should make certain food is prepared properly and plated correctly. My son and I left very unsatisfied, went to another nearby restaurant to complete our goal of a great experience. We tipped our server 20%. I do believe servers should be trained to be the second expeditor to make certain poorly prepared food isn't served. I believe you all have a great restaurant and while this review is shining a positive light on my experience, I believe your potential is exponential. I'm not mad, simply disappointed that the chef, the expeditor and our server missed the disaster of our meal. Young people...take pride in what you do, the owner is counting on you to prepare and serve food you would eat. I'll be back to see if portions and quality have improved. At that point I'll write a second review praising my next experience. Please know, I sincerely mean this review to be recognized as positive encouragement. Let's get focused and turn this...

On Cinco de Mayo my wife and I decided to go to go here to get take out. We come here regularly and usually have had decent experiences. We waited in line for 20 minutes to order and then another hour for food, which was as to be expected due to covid and the Cinco de Mayo crowd.

My wife and I ordered 8 tacos. The girl taking our order wrote it all down correctly, read back to me what I read to her. She placed the order and brought me back a non-itemized receipt, which made sense cost-wise.

When they brought the food to us, they read our order to me which was missing 2 tacos. We told them that we were missing those tacos, and a girl went to check on it for us. Five minutes later, a different employee came out with a $7.70 bill saying if we wanted them that we would have to pay. I told him that I already ordered the tacos and paid, but that my tacos simply weren’t in the bag. He went back to check on them for me. The employee then returned another five minutes later with the original receipt which was all balled up, like it was in the trash, and he went through the bill with me to prove that they were right and that I owed them the money for the tacos.

I begrudgingly paid the extra, and he then placed the order for me, which came out 15 minutes after that point (which was 25 minutes after the original bag of food we already waited an hour for). By this time our original tacos were cold.

In addition, when we went in the car to eat the tacos, some of the tacos had cheese on them, which we ordered them without cheese due to my wife’s dairy allergy.

The poor customer service that I received yesterday is why I will never return to Cantina 76 and I will stop recommending it to colleagues and friends. I hope it was...

Good: the restaurant was spacious and clean. The dirty queso was good. They have multiple tv's to watch sports game. Seemed like a good environment to bring family/groups. They have Modelo and Tecate.

Not so good/bad: customer service is lacking. The female server took our appetizer order and then didn't come back to take our entree orders until after a food runner already brought our app and we ate it all. I ordered a Patron pomegranate margarita and what i got was rail and was watered down. My boyfriend ordered a Long Island and his drink was watered down too and tasted like it only had a splash tequila. So for our next round we ordered beers. I was not brought the beer that i ordered but i still drank it because i haven't found many places that sell Modelo so i didn't say anything especially since i was more anxious about getting our tacos. We ordered the pulled pork, chicken pesto, peruvian shrimp, and fish tacos.... the only tacos that we liked was the fish taco. We weren't impressed by any of the other tacos because they were either dry/lacked seasoning or cold. We didn't even bother ordering dessert. In the end i ended up wrapping up my tacos with only one bite in each of them and we went to another establishment to eat and drink for the rest of the night.

I would suggest going to an authentic family owned Mexican restaurant if you want real Tex-Mex food, which we did...