Amelia's Taqueria — Restaurant in Somerville

EDIT: Management responded to my review and many others and, wow, what a mess. I think it’s very deceptive how in denial they are about their own pricing structure. Sure, a burrito starts around $11-14 but you can’t ignore that after the first two toppings you get UPCHARGED $0.65 per topping! Doesn’t matter if it’s a cheap topping like lettuce or cheese. Thanks for the economic rundown on groceries, I am very aware and so I know when I’m getting screwed over on a charge for a pitiful handful of a burrito topping. It’s misleading to act so naive about your own pricing, especially when anyone can go to your website to verify it. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how many toppings you throw at it because it doesn’t fix how flavorless the food is. A raise in price is fine, so long as the flavor matches. They are stingy with pricing and even stingier with flavor. My advice - take a break from the rambling review responses and focus on getting your seasoning and salsa up to snuff. Or just find a vendor to sell you cheaper, lower quality ingredients, because if the ingredients are as high quality as you say, then you are putting them to waste!

Original Review: The food is extremely bland, meat is overcooked and dry and the rice is overcooked and mushy. Have tried different options and there is no discernible difference in flavor (or lack thereof). The convenience of quick throughput of Sabroso is gone as you can no longer get a burrito or bowl served “with everything.” Part of this is because half of the ingredients are now up-charges on top of already more expensive starting prices. $20 for a burrito where the only flavor coming through are the diced jalapeños is insane. At that price you can go to Mama Ana a block away and get a far superior burrito. I’ve not tried other Amelia’s locations but from what I’ve heard, this one is a bit of an exception in terms of bad food (others are better). There are a lot of good new lunch spots in assembly and this is not one of them. Hopefully they can pack it up quicker than it took them to get here. Maybe the next tenant...

EDIT:

They responded to my review and after reviewing several other 1 star reviews my point is validated that the meat is weird, vibe is off, and prices are high. They suggested in their response that NO ONE is complaining about their meat which is just plain wrong. Clearly they need new management as their attitudes are horrible and they don't even want to listen to the feedback given by paying customers. I will never be going back until it seriously changes it's recipes, prices, and attitude.

Original post:

I used to love Sobrosos! So sad to see them go. I've given this place 4 chances. The spoons they use to serve the meat is a joke I think it's a 1/4th cup ladle. The amount of rice and food they give in general is based on person which seems ridiculous given their prices. It's about $17 for a burrito steak bowl. The meat has some weird fat that makes certain pieces disintegrate in your mouth and turn fatty in the worst way. The rice, which looks promising has no flavor. The service isn't great, nobody is smiling and just wants to get you out the door which is to bad considering Sobrosos had great staff.

I'd love to come back if the meat was fixed to not have that fatty pieces, prices went down, and the serving sizes were consistent as sometimes I need to ask for extra meat or rice depending on server.

I understand that the economy is expensive for everyone but they have to think about the people paying for their food and the impression they leave if they want to charge the price...

This is a real review, don't pay attention to those auto generated reviews (the 5 star one sentence reviews). That should already tell you enough. Regardless, this place is highly highly disappointing, given how good Sabroso was in the past before. All the food is bland. Barely any seasoning, a lot of things need salt, from protein to beans to salsa, all bland. It seems like Amelia's came up just so they can hike up the price of everything and charge you for add-ons. Why am I paying extra for onions and cilantro when that should be standard at any Taqueria. Overall, not recommended unless you want to spend 23$ on a basic/bland burrito and have it ruin your day because you spent all that money for no flavor.

** EDIT: Included screenshots in response to what they wrote back

You can actually build a burrito online for 20 plus dollars right now. That's with most toppings and extra protein.

Also for those other reviews, when you have brackets in text, it usually entails that there was a "[insert restaurant name here]" situation. Auto generated or not, it's definitely not genuine.

Plenty more I can write, but I'll let the owner's response to this review help with...