Chilango — Restaurant in Minneapolis

I love writing a glowing review. I'd much rather bring attention to my favorite spots than critique places I didn't enjoy as much. However, Chilango has a lot of promise - and looking at other reviews, I think they often follow through on this promise! Unfortunately, that was not my experience.

For context: we had an 8PM, Sunday night reservation at Chilango. In general, I wouldn't recommend that timing at most MSP spots, but we were excited to go and it was the only reservation available when we were looking (about a week prior).

Ambiance: 8PM on a Sunday is too late to be at Chilango, as it turns out. Not sure why no earlier reservations were available - the place was mostly empty when we arrived. Perhaps there were a rash of cancellations due to the weather. The vibe was...off. View is gorgeous, decoration is nice, mostly-empty restaurant full of folks already breaking down / cleaning is not my favorite - at that point, I'd rather clear out and get out of the way!

Service: First off: the folks at Chilango were all great. Our server was helpful and friendly, collaboration seemed decent. However, service itself was sporadic and food (and especially drinks) took a while to arrive. I'm not able to get a solid grasp of the total size of the place, but it's possible that they had cut folks due to the quiet and late hour - our server was constantly moving. We sat close enough to the bar to watch our drinks hang out for 10m after being made. If I was 100% confident they were our drinks, I would gladly have grabbed them myself. One drink was noted as a "slushy" - perhaps it is when immediately made, but it's just cold and a bit watery after sitting out. Still good, though - and on that topic...

Food and Drinks: Drinks were all solid. The cocktail program was the highlight of our experience. Petite Leon sets a high standard, and while Chilango may not join my favorite spots for cocktails in the cities, it holds its own. Not a massive cocktail list, but a good list - like a good menu - benefits from variety via brevity.

The food, on the other hand, was frankly mid - and quite expensive for the size, ingredients and quality. Again, this may be our fault for being there on a Sunday night. "Mex-tex" is unique on the surface, but the menu rarely strays too far from well-tread staples - and two weeks in, it's not keeping up with Colita or Oro, much less Petite León. The Mole was thin and mild; shrimp was meager. The fish tacos were the strongest entrant on the menu, with generous portions and an excellent balance of textures.

Price: This is the other puzzling component of our meal. Cocktails are $15 at a baseline, but that's becoming the norm. $23 for sweet-potato enchiladas? $33 for steak fajitas? Even the cauliflower is $26 - is the rent astronomical? Are we helping pay off a blood debt, or have the prices just been normalized based on the neighborhood? PL may charge you $30 for an entree, but it's an entree with heft and intrigue. Chilango seems content to charge you the same $30 for a lesser, smaller version of the dish you could get at Pineda, Maya et al for $10.

In conclusion: I hope they figure this place out. Our experience does not align with what others have written, and does not align with what this team is capable of. Enjoy the ambiance at a busy hour and well before close, and maybe hold off another couple of weeks while staffing and coordination is ironed out. Personally, I hope I get to go back in six months, have a wonderful time, and delete this review from...

Chilango replaced Urban Eatery, a tired yet reliable local spot for moderately priced food, a spot to eat, grab a drink while you watch a game, solo or in groups. There’s no question that Chilango aspires to something higher, but the betting in our adjacent building is they don’t last past October.

Why? Let’s count the ways.

Prices are crazy. Sit at the bar, order chips with guacamole, drink 2 margaritas, you are $50 in the hole. It’s extremely hard to eat a meal with a couple of drinks for less than $75/person here. If you walk away from Dario and you’ve paid way up, you think, “so what, that was awesome!” No one is thinking that here.

Service is absurdly, almost deliberately awful. Bartenders walk past you on important missions to nowhere while you wait 5 minutes to make a drink order. Wait staff seems confused and hurried. It’s a clear goal to get the food out quickly here - I’ve never seen anywhere faster - but no one has a sense of spacing your meal, no matter how much you beg. “I want the chips and guacamole first, please, then put in the shrimp order please?” Poof - in 107 seconds, here’s your shrimp, chips follow in 7 minutes. Happened to me the first time, okay, that’s on me, but the second time I couldn’t prevent it either (they actually forgot the chips the second time). Chilango doesn’t want to serve a meal, it’s trying to win a race for hot food turnaround.

And attitude is just so poor, at every level. Chilango is open from lunch through dinner on weekends, but there’s zero food available in the afternoon after they shut down lunch. If you beg, you can get chips and salsa, but no real food,just drinks. They’re sort of begging you to walk to Taberna. At night, the kitchen closes at 9, the place at 10, and the night I was there, they stopped taking food orders before 9, and the bar staff worked feverishly to close up between then and 10, with little interest in taking drink orders from customers while steaming plates of food were served to the staff. The place smacks of over-indulgence on the workforce (which isn’t reciprocating with great service) with very little interest in what customers want (like a meal that comes out with the right timing, or some mid-priced options more in line with the actual menu quality and service level). Questions about why we couldn’t order food up until 9, when closing was, and whether there was an afternoon menu were answered with attitude, seemingly by staff unaware of how unusual this operation is compared to a successful restaurant.

So, big sigh. I want Chilango to make it (but I bet the under in October) but there is zero indication they understand just how many people I’ve heard from who are one and done here. I tried twice. And Taberna is a very...

My friends and I visited here for a part of my birthday celebration as we have talked about this place before so I wanted to at least give it a shot. Overall the food was okay, and I intentionally avoided most dishes under the fuertes section not only because they were pricey but also because I wanted to see how much care they put into dishes that customers probably relatively order less, so I ordered quite a few dishes under the para la mesa section.

In terms of highlight, the best dish in my opinion was actually the pistachio tres leches. The milk was definitely there, and there was a good amount of pistachio flavor immersed into the cake. I thought that texturally it worked very well, too, because the softness of the cake provided a good contrast with the pistachio bits on the top. The esquites were great as well, with the tajin crema providing both a sense of creaminess and just a tiny bit of spice, and the manchego cheese giving flavor. The baja fish tacos contained a good amount of white fish and the chipotle crema added flavor. Personally I liked the fact that the brisket tacos had a good amount of smoked brisket meat, but my friend who ordered the dish didn't enjoy it because she didn't think the salsa was flavorful enough, which I could understand but disagreed with.

Other dishes were leaning towards okay to meh, such as the papas machas, which had fried yukon potatoes containing very good crispy texture but way too salty flavor, especially if the potatoes were tiny and had a lot of oil at the bottom. The brussel sprouts did not have enough lime vinaigrette so it was practically flavorless, especially since it was probably deep fried without additional seasoning, which also caused some pieces to be hard to chew. The grilled snapper itself was almost flavorless, and relied on the salsa for flavor completely. I didn't understand it because it looked like it was grilled in achiote, so I assumed it followed the tikin xic dish in Yucatán Mexico, with pickled red onions and all. Maybe the achiote paste didn't have enough spices in it for marinading, or maybe the time wasn't enough.

Even though as of now I wouldn't actively recommend this establishment to others yet, I would still like to visit myself to try some dishes that my other friends have hyped up, namely the enchiladas de...