La Carreta South Willow — Restaurant in Manchester

I really hate writing bad reviews. But I learn from and appreciate what others share, so fair's fair.

I arrived a bit late (after 9 on Saturday, and the restaurant closes at 11). I spent a minute or two at the host stand being studiously ignored by the wait staff I could see, so I figured I should go to the bar. Hint: a say saying: "Hosted hours are over, please seat yourself would be welcome.

The bar had 2 servers, a man and a younger woman. After a minute or two, the woman said, "I'll be with you in a bit." I said, "Thanks." Things were looking up. However, after taking several minutes to serve other patrons, her priority when returning to the bar was to eat several cherries while I watched.

When she got around to me, I asked if they had Hendricks gin. They do not. So I asked for a Tanqueray and tonic, with light ice and a lime and menu. She delivered it with the light ice and no lime, and a menu. I asked again for a lime and got it. All this the bar is not busy (now I know why) and there were no other orders to be filled. To make matters worse, they serve the cheap, flavorless tonic...

She wandered off. After 5 or 6 minutes, I asked her colleague if I could order and he took my order of a burrito.

The chicken in the burrito was cooked well beyond death. It did not come with the refried beans listed in the menu and wasn't really worth eating. I figured it was time to cut my losses and give up, which I did. Not to mention that the man behind the bar was spending all of his time chatting with a Spanish speaking couple at the end of the bar and ignoring the rest of the patrons.

The only way to have an experience this bad is to go to a place where management just doesn't care. There's no brilliance in taking the customer's order before munching on bar cherries in front of waiting customers. There is no great engineering required in serving a plate that has all the items listed on the menu.

If you want a crappy experience with bad food and drink, this is...

My husband and I went out for a much needed date night. Thankfully there was no wait when we arrived at La Carreta, and the hostess brought us to the back of the restaurant. We passed a bunch of open booths and we were brought to a small two top. I asked the hostess to sit in one of the many open larger booths, and she said sorry on Friday and Saturday nights, she's not allowed to seat two tops in booths. The next people to be seated in our sections were seated, the two of them, in the booth across from us. My husband and I ordered drinks, which were good. We ordered food and were greatly disappointed! My husband ordered fajitas. The meat and veggies were not seasoned at all. I ordered a taco salad and the salad was so pathetic! I wish I had taken a picture of it before I broke into it. The shell was less than six inches in diameter and there was like nothing to it. There was a tiny bit of refried beans, meat, one half slice of tomato, and you can't really even say it was a salad because there was basically no lettuce. I'm incredibly disappointed! We've eaten here before and have never had an experience like this. I said I wasn't going to eat it and would have ordered something else, but the waiter said I got exactly what I ordered. The South Willow location is also more expensive than the Hooksett location. We've been to the Hooksett location and haven't ever had a problem. At the very end, after we paid, the manager came over, I explained what happened he said he would take my meal off the bill since I didn't eat it and to show the kitchen the quality...

I generally don’t leave reviews and usually give people the benefit of the doubt, but service was not good at this location. We’ve eaten in multiple locations many times and this was the worst service by far. Although, I understand the possible staffing issues due to COVID, this should have been better. We were shown where to sit(by the host pointing, not seating us) and waited several minutes before anyone came out. We got our chips and salsa fairly quickly, but the actual server took several minutes to get to us. We ordered drinks and he started to walk away (we wanted to order an app, but he never asked), so we had to stop him before he took off. We got our queso (again he walked away and didn’t ask if we needed more chips-it was obvious we were low). Next time he walks by, we had to grab him for more chips. Instead of just getting us more, he took what we had left away. Ummm ok. He comes back with more chips and again walks away. We looked at each other and was like “I guess we didn’t want any dinner because he never bothered to ask if we were ready to order. “ We waited about 15 minutes before he came to ask us if we wanted to order. We ordered, got our food and ate...but wait. We didn’t get any plates. Not with our appetizer or with our dinner. So we ate over the foil that came with our tortillas. Walking by us several times and not once asked if everything was ok (or noticed we had no plates). Seriously?! Doubt we’ll ever go to that location again. Really no excuse for that. The only upside was the Margarita. It’s was...