El Norteño — Restaurant in Island Lake

This place is great...when they get your order right. Jose always ensured phone orders were packaged right with nothing missing. He's now gone and sadly, so is the assurance of our phone orders being right. The last 3 times we've ordered, our orders missed avocado, which we paid for, tortillas to complete the order, salsa, or they ran out of ingredients making us change our order when we got there - having to wait longer to complete our order. Or sometimes they just flat missed part of the order, meaning we purchased and paid for a dinner, but just got the sandwich or entree. It's just really frustrating. Dinner for 4 is not cheap and all we get is sorry, we'll fix it next time or you can come back. They have expanded pretty quickly, but their attention to detail has not. When we call the person taking the order is always multi-tasking and in a rush. We've decided to stop ordering for now, and started looking for a new place. We're sad because the food really is good when everything is right. Hopefully with time and training they'll...

Skip the fairly new sampler platter. It's full of leftovers presented in a ridiculous fashion, like hard tamales (cut in half--who does that?), a mini flour "quesadilla" with a slice of lunchmeat ham or canadian bacon and non-melted mozzarella or provolone, a dried out flauta or taquito, etc. Mario is always offering something new, but this one was a loser.

There is a reason they don't bring your check to the table. It's so you walk up to the register where the cashier gets creative and rips you off. For example, two tacos becomes a taco dinner price. Unless you've tallied up everything in advance in your mind, you may not catch it. They've been doing this for years. Thought it had stopped, but it happened again. No more Mario meals. Very disappointed. At least the extra proceeds are going back into the business, so it appears.

I think it's the large portions that are the big draw. Nothing special, except for a couple of unique offerings. Don't show up at opening time; you won't feel welcomed, unless that's a...

I drove here to pick up dinner for my family and when I got home, I saw that my meal wasn't in the bag. I called the restaurant back right away to tell them it was missing and that I was going to come back to get it. Instead of offering me a simple solution, the employees decided to argue with each other whether the dinner was in my bag for several minutes. I finally had to get the attention of the woman on the phone because I was just sitting there listening to them argue.

When I got back to the restaurant, the women employees were laughing at me (how very professional of them) and the man who brought my food out snickered and insisted he made the dinner the first time. They would rather accuse a customer of being a liar and a thief than admit they were wrong.

I will not be returning to this restaurant. This is one of four Mexican restaurants we order carry-out from and this one is by far the worst. Plus, it's more expensive than the others.

My dinner was ice cold as well, which proves it was left behind...