Cien Agaves Tacos & Tequila — Restaurant in Scottsdale

I’ll start this off by saying that I’m honestly not overly critical and pretty easy to please. The service overall was pretty decent, but nothing overly spectacular. The chips and salsa were good and they did a good job of quickly refilling them upon request. You do have to pay $4 for unlimited chips and salsa which is a fair price, but slightly annoying since at almost every other Mexican restaurant that’s free. Our food came out in an average amount of time. My dish had a long dark hair across the top of it, which honestly, doesn’t gross me out, but I had to go up and wait to let them know about it. I told them they didn’t have to take the time to remake it and I would just prefer that they remove it from the bill since my young son was sharing the dish with me and he was already very hungry. They did insist on remaking it, which I appreciate, but also, it was difficult for my son to have to wait even longer for food. The only thing he would eat was the rice, he didn’t like any of the rest of it, which is fine, because he’s a kid, but also, he isn’t super picky generally. I do have to say that my dish was pretty salty. There really wasn’t much actual flavor to it. My husband had the Taco Tuesday tacos and he describes them as very basic. They were also very salty. The flavor was pretty bland, the tortillas were probably the same thing you could get from the grocery store. I really greatly appreciate that they did take my dish off of the bill, that speaks volumes to me. We had actually came to this restaurant when we were in town last year and just had some drinks, chips, and tacos, we only picked it again due to the location. I truly appreciate that the hostess (who was actually the one I spoke to about the hair on my dish) and the server also apologized and even more so that they not only re-made it, but took it off my bill, but I wouldn’t come back here unless maybe I just wanted chips and drinks. The atmosphere is really awesome, they have some really cool outdoor seating areas. If you’re wanting authentic Mexican cuisine, skip this place. But if you want a cool place to hang out, I’d recommend it for that...

Cien Agaves serves up some amazing tacos. And it is definitely above average. But for the overall Phoenix / Scottsdale Mexcian food landscape, it will have to step up its game a bit to get 5 stars.

The joint is in a "salooon"-like place with Mexican festival accents. You feel like you've walked into an old tavern or a saloon, setting the right vibes.

The food is also quite good. The shrimp tacos had a bit of kick and were done really well. Loved the pulled beef taco as well. The salad was fresh with well marinated skirt bits. And yes, the guacamole was freshly prepared. But again, each dish was "quite good" but not mind blowing. I could definitely sense that there seems to be a slight lack of passion in the preparation. The receipes and what they were creating is absolutely spot on. But there's just something a bit amiss in putting the entire plate together. It just falls a mile short in a marathon. I can only simply call it out as carelessness or lack of passion for perfection.

The service we got was pretty horrid though. Our server brought a different taco (we ordered fish but got shrimp) and never bothered to even offer any hot sauce, etc. And it wasn't as if the place was busy at the time of our dining (Monday early evening). But my 4-stars wasn't because of just the service.

If you are in Oldtown Scottsdale, you should check out Cien Agaves. Are there better tacos out there? Absolutely. But for a regular tourist, I think you'll...

Atmosphere was super cool and our group of 6 was very excited to get hotel recommendation to visit here. Sadly all went awry when trying to order a drink at the bar. The hostess let us know it would be a 20 min, so of course we went to order a drink at the bar. Although there was pretty of room to stand around the bar, we were aggressively told, we needed to sit down to be served. Within a minute or two, five of our group of six had seats. (Keep in mind we are enjoying our vacation/visiting and not really understanding the apparent rigidness of being required to be seated to be served) when we the young female bartender even more snottily told the one person standing he would not be served and she wasn't serving any of us seated either. Everyone around the bar could hear/see this. We are 55-65 year old people deserving far more respect from a 20 something. It was as if we were unruly, drunk people at bar time getting scolded....which we were not!! At this point, we got up and left costing the restaurant lost business...and we shared experience the rest of the night with driver, restaurant we did eat at. If the seat policy was this strict, the hostess should have explained when we put our name in! It was obvious we would wait at the bar for our table. Secondly the young bartender needs to grown up and learn some customer service training! There would have been a nice way to talk with us on...