On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina — Restaurant in Dundee Township

I've gone here a number of times. It has never been particularly great food but it's fine and there are things I can eat. It's not a place me and my wife go regularly as there are much better Mexican restaurants not that far away but the location is convenient to us so it seems every 3 or 4 months we probably end up in here.

Last night likely ended that. The actual meal portion was the same fine experience we normally have. Decent food, not spectacular but fine. The service was fine, a bit slow to get our order and get chips/salsa but nothing terrible and the waiter was friendly, got our order right, and our drinks were staying mostly refilled. It would have been another decent 3 star night at On the Border.

When we went to ask for the check though we were told their systems were having issues and it would be a couple of minutes. We then didn't hear from anyone for 20 minutes. At that point we managed to flag the waiter down who advised it would be a few more minutes. He then realized he had already printed our check before it went down but we didn't have cash and the pay system was down too. Upon review it was wrong anyway as something for the table behind us got added and he had no way to fix it because the system was down. We were told he had just been told it should only be another 5 minutes.

We waited another 20 minutes before hearing from anyone again. At this point we had been down eating for 40 minutes and really needed to go, my wife had to work early today and we still needed to pack for a trip we're leaving for once she gets out tonight. He advised he would check with his manager to see if our check could just be let go as we had kept it pretty cheap and had already waited a long time. We appreciated it and he then was gone another 10 minutes. Finally coming back he said the manager had found one of the old school credit card machines where you take a print of the card and as long as we were cool with that it would work. At this point it was fine as we just wanted to go. They ran it... and when they brought it to us we realized they had charged us wrong, overcharging by 3.00 for one of their items. He dropped the check so quick though I didn't catch it and after 10 minutes I literally had to go searching through the restaurant to find our waiter. this was an hour after we asked for the check.

They did fix it (mostly, it was still wrong but only by a few cents and I was done arguing). We never during all of this heard from a manager or anything. Our waiter was apologetic but we barely heard from him during this time. They weren't that busy and while I want to cut him some slack on a personal level because I'm sure having their entire computer system go down was stressful and he had a lot of unhappy customers to deal with, it made for an extremely negative experience. That the manager never came around I found unacceptable. While I'm also not one to expect freebies or comps at restaurants, I found it rather rude that nothing was offered to us for an hour wait. (whether it be something being taken off, a coupon for next time, something)

If everything goes well you'll probably get a perfectly adequate mediocre Mexican meal. If anything goes wrong though, good luck as they seem to have no idea how to handle such...

The food here is consistently delicious. They serve endless chips and salsa , which is a nice perk. The margaritas and other marg themed drinks are higher priced than normal, in my book, considering they are next door to a place that also serves great drinks and has a happy hour. However the drinks are good here and the flavors are interesting. When we have 3+ people, we normally get a pitcher because it's a good deal at $25, vesus $8-10 a drink.

Typically, the service is on point. The service themes I noticed are: they refill chips and salsa regularly, even offer to wrap up any left at the end of the meal and top off the bag,as well. They offer a shot of tequila with drinks for less than $2, I believe. And they do offer dessert. Most of the days have a special entree.

We've been here around lunch and around dinner numerous times. Thus time on Sunday, around 3:30 PM... no hostess. Theres were about 12-14 patrons, including us, on the bar side. A little less then half full in that area. We seated ourselves. It was about 8 mins before someone brought us a menu. Our waiter was clearly the only waiter on that side of the restaurant. He briskly helped every table and came back frequntly. He was occasionally assisted by one of the kitchen crew, but he was clearly overwhelmed. I applaud him for handling the situation with a fair amount of zeal.

He forgot to offer the tequila shot, and at the end of our stay, and I observed this at other tables as well, he handed out the chip bags and stickers so we could bag the chips ourselves. He did ask us if we wanted dessert.

The two of us got Borderitos, and they were hot, fresh, and as expected. I was charged for a small ramaken of sour cream, and I thought $1 was a bit high. I feel like sour cream is basically a condiment married to the food they serve.

This would probably be a 5/5 had we received service consistent with our previous visits. The food is good, and they seemed to be sufficiently staffed 3 of 5 of my visits.

We've also chosen this location at least 2 of the 5 or 6 time we've been there because we had coupons, which is something we've only recently...

So I went here against a warning from a friend. I was craving nachos and didn't want to drive 30 min to my own job to get them. Service was great...greated immediately (not with chips right away...server was delivering food to another table) we ordered 2 appetizers to share. The nachos and ground beef empanadas. The nachos were great (kinda hard to mess those up) and the empanadas...were inedible to be polite. There was nothing inside that even resembled ground beef...it looked like a lard paste..grayish in color. Taco bell has higher quality ground beef. My son put one bite and had to force it down...and put it back on the plate. Our server stopped by and asked if we needed a box I politely said no...we didn't care for them. (Literally one bite gone) he said he'd be back...proceeded to deliver food to other tables. As he is doing that some gal stopped at the table (who resembled a manager) asked if we needed a box...again stated we didn't care for them...she said oh were they the ground beef? Yeah they aren't popular and not a favorite...but I'm obsessed with the chicken. (That's odd) so our check arrives and our server Announces they took off my side of sour cream and guac since I didn't use it....but surprise surprise the empanadas were still on the check...we ate more of the sour cream and guac than the empanada surprise. Umm thanks I guess but I'm just annoyed now that you did the least for customer satisfaction...you could have offered the chicken empanadas...to go as an option...Just poor execution I feel. How to you openly share that no one likes ur product and do nothing to make it right...leaves a bad taste in my mouth...more ways than...