Maria's Mexican Restaurant — Restaurant in Custer

I’m reviewing this nice restaurant from my previous experience. It’s a beautiful restaurant. Of course, the food is usually more basic and simple. I’m from California. This previous experience was from my trip to some states in the west. The restaurant is located near some nice trees that look so country and mysterious at night. If you walk into the Mexican restaurant, you will see plenty of decoration and my bus tour group was feeling easy and relaxed at such a late part of night. For dinner, I decided to go with the beef steak fajita. Even our bus tour guide did not know what my food was, at first. Then, when me and the rest of the group saw the beef steak fajita, it was all working like magic. Like I’ve said, they serve mostly basic and simple food here. The fajita sauce is very unique. What’s interesting, is the chips and salsa, because the chips and salsa also come with beans for dipping. I don’t see beans with chips and salsa very often in California. That’s very interesting. Having beans with mild red salsa does take the edge off of a long trip into this rural area. If you’re traveling to Custer, make sure you don’t drink too much and make sure you bring a nice pillow. It’s good for a bus tour trip. When visiting the restaurant I was noticing the decorations on the walls. The environment is very comfortable. From the rumors I hear, restaurants in Custer close earlier for the night. Nevada and Arizona have more late-night entertainment. As we were going by on our bus I saw a nice little pizza restaurant close to Maria’s Mexican restaurant. Custer is most certainly a place for country comfort. Maria’s Mexican restaurant serves soup, fajitas, tacos, burritos and not much else. The restaurant could’ve done better with sauces and spices. We have to keep in mind that this is a Mexican restaurant in a small town near lots of trees near Mount Rushmore. I was enjoying the experience late last year around fall schedule. It was easy to be happy with other guests and the hard-working crew. In fact, I was waiting a long time for my beef steak fajita because the restaurant was working later than usual. It was a privilege to taste their wonderful steak and sauce combination. Our trip was still exhausting for me a week later. You can get drink refills, hot soup, and people who go with the flow. There was so much excitement for all of us, and, we were hungry for another bite. I’m already very familiar with the basic Mexican food items such as tacos and burritos and I hope customers really enjoy them in this part of America. They should get more nachos. That’s for sure! I’ve been to better Mexican restaurants. But, for the pleasure, and, for the trip, it was a memorable moment at Maria’s...

They do not serve alcohol! Had we known this before walking in, we would have gone elsewhere. We wanted a margarita!

We stayed and waited to be seated. Our server did not write down our order but was attempting to do it from memory but when it came out, it was wrong. My daughter ordered chicken quesadilla kids meal, she received a bean and cheese quesadilla. My son asked for lettuce and tomatoes on his tacos and they came out with just cheese. Service was slow. We didn’t get the salsas we asked for. The chips are kind of thick for what we prefer.

The food was ok. The fajitas had all green peppers besides one strip each of red and yellow. Definitely cutting on cost and for $20 I didn’t have a lot of chicken. Tortillas were overcooked and burnt on one side but they were still served.

I’m sure it’s a great restaurant for the town, but just mediocre if assessing nation wide.

**Editing my review after the owner response.... The first I saw no alcohol was on the hostess stand. I did not look at the door because I was parking the car and my dad was holding the door for me open.

With a response like this owner's I would NEVER recommend this restaurant to anyone. They never even addressed all the errors made with our order....

I've had very few restaurant experiences where I have nothing good to say and this was one of them. First of all it was maybe 90 degrees outside and a solid 88 degrees inside. My girlfriend and I walked in and waited for maybe 5 minutes before anyone said anything to us. We finally got seated and gave the gal our drink order. It took 15 minutes to get our drinks, chips, salsa, and beans (keep in mind there are only 3 other tables with people at them). We finally got our chips and beans/salsa, this was the strangest salsa I've ever tasted. It was unusually aromatic and not in a good way, the beans were kind of bland but not bad. We finally get our food and I can't say I really liked any of it. I got the barbacoa tacos and the meat was cooked so long it was like chewing leather, the rice tasted like it came from a box of uncle ben's or zatarans or something and then there were more of the bland beans. I should have waited the 45 minutes to eat at another restaurant in the area but I was hungry and this place had a lot of open seating which is the only reason we went there (the open seating should have been an idea of what...