El Rancho Viejo — Restaurant in Council Grove

Probably the worst restaurant I have been to in Kansas. They advertised "taco Tuesday $1.75", when we asked for those, the waitress told us they were out of hard shells to make them. I finally ordered a random lunch, and what did it come with? A hard shell taco. So she basically lied to us so we wouldn't use their special sale. This isn't the worst though, because after we ordered our food, the waitress calmly went in the back, and we could clearly hear the microwave running. The food came in 30 seconds later, and was disgusting as one could easily imagine. I have to leave them one star, we'll say it's for serving the food quickly (microwaves are such a wonderful technology), for the rest stay away from this place, for microwaved food and staff who lie to you, this is...

Right now we could only find 3 dine in places in Council Grove that are open Sunday afternoon. This is one of them. The restauraunt was clean and neat, very little atmosphere, just some stereotypical "mexican" posters and music playing. The staff was polite. The menu was overwhelmingly big and complex. Our food was delivered quickly and was tasty. It is seasoned mildly, in our families' case, this is a plus. Two of our dinner companions felt it was a bit pricey for the size of the portions, but we all left "full". The unlimited chips and salsa at the beginning of service were very tasty. The "special" really wasn't special, just a suggestion someone had written on the special board. Not a discounted price, or a drink thrown in or something else to...

There's a bell curve with Mexican restaurants. Most of them fall in the middle with similar tastes and dishes. There are the occasional bad ones. And there are the occasional phenomenal ones. El Rancho Viejo is one of the latter. Council Grove doesn't know how good they've got it. I went in with average expectations, but the flavor was really good. They offer options, such as many made-in-house sauces I've never seen at any other Mexican restaurant I've been to. The portions were smaller than the average Mexican restaurant, but the flavor made up for it. The service was also good the time I was there. I loved it so much, I hope to make it back one day and try...