Cenote Grill — Restaurant in Escondido

Cold food, dated cheap ambiance, nice staff.

My husband lost his restaurant picking privileges. After choosing this place. We wanted to give a new Mexican place a shot and the photos looked pretty okay. We Go, and from the minute we walk into the minute we leave. We are the youngest people there by about 20 years. It was packed with white people and every one of them was over the age of 60. When your Mexican restaurant and not a single Mexican person eats there, there's a problem.

The staff was actually very prompt and courteous and got us seated. The booths have impromptu pads being leaned against them like they are waiting for a real shipment of booths to come in. Also some weird mother earth art on the wall is best as I can guess. But nothing that distinctly said a Mexican restaurant. Immediately gave us free chips and two different kinds of salsa. One tasted like watery tomato paste. The other one tasted vaguely like someone had waived tomatillo at it once and it's life.

You order up front. I don't have a problem with that. Our food arrived within a solid amount of time. But my meat was cold to the touch. As if they had made it this morning (gosh I hope it was that morning and not the night before). My cheese was also barely melted. I got a burrito fresco and took two bites and didn't want more.

My kids got a shrimp burrito and a fish taco. There was no spice other than cumin in the shrimp burrito. But considering the age of most of the patrons, I'm pretty sure that was on purpose. My other child's fish taco had the batter slide right off of it but it was perfectly fine otherwise.

My husband and I were glad that we only had a few bites of our food. We felt queasy the rest of the night and kept chugging Gatorade and burping suspiciously. It would have been a lot worse if we would have actually had more than a few bites of our food.

At least with Taco Bell I would have gotten some hot meat and some packets of spice along with my indigestion. I get to pick next time,...

This place wowed me again. Unbelievably good carne asada. Mouthwatering tenderness, perfectly seasoned. You don't even need any salsa. IT'S THAT GOOD!!!! Service is a++++. I want to know how they cook their carne asada!!!!

I almost forgot. They are keto friendly. Instead of rice and beans that comes with carne asada they substituted a salad with cilantro lime dressing. This was huge!!!! It could have been a meal in itself!!! They don't skimp on the carne asada either. I am so full I'm about to explode!

I am so bummed this place couldn't be closer to us. 10 STAR!!!!

Previous review in 2007: Ate there while passing through Escondido.  I had the carne asada plate.  It was unbelievably good.  The carne asada is marinated which makes it moist, tender, and very flavorful.  They also give you tons of food for very little $.  The corn chips are the gourmet kind, not the cheap ones you find in the supermarket.  They bring you a green and red salsa.  The red one is the hotter one.  Both had great flavor.  I asked for additional things like a spicier salsa (unless it's smoldering like a witch's brew, and can kill a hippo with a single drop, it ain't hot enough).  She said they didn't have anything spicier but then she brought a bottle of this really spicy hot sauce, we added it to the awesome flavored salsa on the table and we were in heaven.  Food - 5 stars!

The waitress (I was told her nickname was "la Rena") was very polite, professional, attentive, fast and didn't complain when both my wife and I customized our order.  She refilled our ice teas at least 4 times, and came back to check on us if we needed anything.  The place was about 3/4 full when we arrived for dinner on Sunday.  The noise level is below average and the clientele demographics is mostly families.  There's a private parking lot and plenty of parking.  Service - 5 stars

I wish we had this place local.  I've bookmarked this place in my gps if we ever need to go...

There is no denying the food is amazing. It's some of the best Mexican food in the area, no doubt. Great prices too.

HOWEVER, they need to improve on the operational side of things to make their employees lives easier, their customers lives easier, and make everyone happy.

They only accept phone orders, and often it's difficult to hear the order taker repeat back the items you ordered to make sure it's correct. That leads to almost half of the orders we've placed here on the phone being wrong in some way. Sometimes it's an entirely different item, sometimes it's a small thing. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE enable online ordering to help reduce this issue. Your staff will receive less calls, customers won't wait on hold forever once it hits 6 pm, and there will be less mistakes. I'm sure there are options that don't charge big fees besides Uber , one I found is Bento box.

Next, you have one line for people who are picking up to go orders, and the same line for people who want to dine in. You don't know whether you should stand in line with everyone, go to the cashier and check in, it's confusing. Provide One line for people who want to dine in, and one line for people who are picking up to their to-go orders. If you enabled online payment for orders, you wouldn't have long a line of people picking up there to go orders, just saying. This confusion inside the restaurant can lead you to stand around for an extra 20 minutes when you didn't need to.

Also they don't call out when to go Orders are ready, you have to ask the cashier the status.

Again, the food is amazing, but the operational challenge with giving you my money almost makes it to the point where I don't want to come back. I genuinely...