El Cerro Grande Mexican Restaurant — Restaurant in North Carolina

I've been to this establishment before and I raved so much about how great of an experience I had to my friends. So it was natural they wanted to come. Once we arrived we noticed that others were being served drinks before us. Keep in mind we ordered water. We waited 30 minutes to be given our drinks. Not including our alcoholic beverages. This took another 15 minutes after it took forever just to get water. Once we got our drinks new customers began to come in and sit down. When we compared the time they got served verses the time we did, they got food drinks and appetizers before our meal came out. Had to send plates back for being cold "twice". My frozen margarita 🙄 started off with tons of ice chunks. I requested that it be blended correctly. The manager came back with a margarita that was no longer frozen. After being treated like black sheep I requested to speak to the manager once we were finished. No ownership was taken. Instead he blamed our poor experience on our waiter saying she was new and didn't know how to move a quickly as the others. As I'm trying to explain what happened the manager talks over me 😡... listening to respond instead of listening to understand. My poor waiter... She was truly trying I believe. If she was new I felt that someone should have been helping her because obviously she needed it. I don't blame my waiter. I blame the manager. The way he threw her under the bus was disgusting, and if you knew she needed help and she couldn't move fast enough then HELP HER!!! He had no problem checking the tables around us to ensure their experience wasn't tarnished. Very unprofessional experience for me. "4 guest table...

Last night we ate at El Cerro Grande as we have many times in the past. However this time I noticed they had added an automatic tip on the bill even though we only had a party of four. They decided that their service should be tipped at 18% of the bill. I have a problem with this as I am the one who should decide how much I want to tip not them. There was not a notice of any kind that we observed that stated that they would be doing so. Tips are optional and there are generally guidelines out there for doing so but they are guidelines not mandates. This is just another way for the restaurant owners to pass the wages on to the consumer without taking anything away from themselves. I’m sure that there will be people who will spout out about how tipping is part of the cost of dining out. That’s fine but some other people out there may not be able to afford the meal and additional 18% gratuity in addition. More than anything else I resent the establishment tacking on the tip without any input from me. They Eve. Had the gall to include a line for an additional tip if I so chose. I’m not sure this totally legal to add in a “surcharge “ with not disclosing it first. I do know that they have lost a good customer and more than fair tipper because of their deception. I’ll be sure to warn my friends to be aware if they should choose to continue to patronize this establishment. It’s a shame when restaurants and various other businesses decide that they don’t want to pay a fair wage to their employees and put it upon the consumer to make up the difference because of the employer’s...

CHEAP FOOD... HIGHLY PRICED... DISGUSTING... chips are terrible (taste stale/old, chewy, and cold), steak tastes like SPAM (an order is only like 8-10 strips, equivalent to not even a palm size), the rice is not good (has corn, peas, snaps, Lima beans, etc. - even with cheese on the rice, it doesn’t taste good!!!)

And ANOTHER THING... The waiter was VERY opinionated... he didn’t understand us at all! We told him exactly what we wanted, for example: side of rice and some broccoli with cheese... that’s it... nothing else, but all he could say was, so... you want rice with broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, and cheese.... I simply told him no and repeated my order, after a long while of repeating my order, he finally repeated it back, and then said that he couldn’t do that, and wrote my order down as something completely different and after I said that I would just pick out what I didn’t want, he finally said that he would write it down as rice, broccoli, and cheese... why didn’t he just do that to start with?

It didn’t stop there... he charged me about $12 (without tax) for my meal, and all that I ate was 2 pieces of broccoli and one fork full of rice... like I said, the rice was TERRIBLE and had mixed vegetables in it (no flavor to any of the rice or anything) and the broccoli had dirt all on it! The broccoli had a lot of dirt on it... if you’re going to cook/sale something, you need to take the time to prepare it correctly, and do it correctly,...