Fiesta Bonita Mexican Grill & Cantina — Restaurant in Vancouver

Out with my daughter & grandson, we searched the mall area for Mexican fare, &pulled in to La Costa. I was in the mood for a tamale, so I chose a combination plate. Service was fine, &we were pleased by the warm chips &beans that accompanied the salsa.

Service began to lag, as there were several parties going on in the restaurant. We didn't mind being patient, but was enough to really make me wonder where everyone else was. The place is bright & festive, though. Really lovely.

When our food arrived, I was initially confused. What was served didn't look like what I ordered. What I ordered didn't really look like what was on my plate. (I ordered a combo of Chiles Rellenos &a beef picadillo tamale.) The rice & beans looked fine, but for the price, there was not even an orange slice or greenery garnish to break up the monotony on the plate. There was something palm sized, flat &round, covered with red sauce; &a rectangular brick of something else, also doused in red sauce. Nothing looked like a chile rellenos, &nothing looked like a tamale. Did I even receive what I'd ordered? It's anybody's guess!

I decided to explore the plate because by then, a block of time had passed, &I was hungry. The rectangular red-sauced item that I supposed was a chimichanga or burrito mistakenly put on my plate, was, in fact, the tamale. When I said "brick" before to describe this thing, BRICK is accurate. The masa was impossibly thick, hardened &dry! The mealy mess was completely inedible. Thank heavens for a soda to wash that grainy, pasty grit away! I filleted the masa off to quickly get to the what... a delectable filling? WRONG. The stringy beef was flavorless &almost as dry as the impenetrable concrete wall of masa! Ugh! What a disappointment!It was enough to make a grandma cry.

Thank heavens for the micro-sized chile rellenos. It was tasty &hot! Since chiles rellenos are my favorite, I try them at nearly every place that I can. The serving size was inadequate at La Costa. I have never been served such a tiny relleno, not even from the combos at Muchas Gracias! What it lacked in length was also missing in girth. Instead of leaving me wanting more, it just left me bitter.

Rather than raise a fuss, &ruin the outing for my daughter &grandson, I looked around at the patrons having fun. I smiled at every server or manager walking past. I enjoyed the sweet young man who made a balloon toy for my grandson. I looked kindly on the server who lost a lime near my shoe from the margarita he was carrying. &I paid generously for a level of food & service...

Showed up for lunch and wanted to order from the lunch menu as shown on their website, the first waiter told me that I had to order from the dinner menu because they no longer had a lunch menu. I explained that it was on the website and another waiter showed up and explained the manager had discontinued the lunch menu during covid and I guess they never removed it from the website. Also the dinner menu on the website is out of date and the prices are higher now.

The second waiter said he could get me something from the lunch menu “this one time”. Because there was a pretty significant price difference and I went there solely based on the lunch prices I saw online. The second waiter was nice to accommodate me and I understand it wasn’t his fault.

The first waiter was actually pretty rude. Messed up my order. Kind of slammed things down on the table. When I asked him to correct the mistake in the order (he brought wheat tortillas instead of corn which is what I had ordered), he snatched the tortillas off the table without so much as a word. Never apologized, never said any friendly words. Just kind of scowled. Not a friendly person.

The lunch menu carne asada I received was good and I was charged the price which was on the lunch menu online. It didn’t have guacamole though which was in the description.

Overall negative experience. Having to back-and-forth with multiple waiters isn’t fun. They didn’t really speak English very well which made it harder, and when I tried to switch to Spanish (I’m bilingual) they kept speaking to me in English which was uncomfortable. They messed up my order twice. My main waiter was rude.

I’m leaving two stars because the second waiter was nice overall and accommodated me (also because he spoke to me in Spanish while ringing me up after realizing I spoke Spanish; it was the first waiter that wouldn’t switch to Spanish with me.) Also because the carne asada was good.

I figure if you just go for dinner and order drinks and all that they probably won’t treat you bad like this. I got the sense that they probably didn’t value me as a customer as much as other people (I observed their interactions with other customers and my waiter was nicer to them) because I was alone and wanted the lunch menu which is much cheaper so they knew the sales/tip amount would be much lower. The food was decent TexMex-style food so I guess...

I was spending time with a friend and we decided we wanted to go somewhere to get drinks and happened upon La Costa. I ordered a classic blended Margarita which tasted like watered down tequila and she ordered a Spicy Mamacita, which looked green and had cucumbers in it on the picture in the menu. When he brought hers back it was red with two limes on the side. It didn't look like the picture in the menu or what was described in the list of ingredients. So when someone walked by, she asked if perhaps she got the wrong drink because it didn't have jalapenos in it, and he said he would look into it and left with the drink. When he was walking back to the table minutes later he was carrying what appeared to be the same exact drink, with one exception being the jalapeno that was hap-hazardly cut in half and thrown into the giant glass. So, again she asked if maybe she got the wrong drink and again he left, only to return a few minutes later and confirm that it was entered wrong and they had made a mistake. Which was fine, things happen, and at this point, she just wanted the drink she ordered. So a few minutes later he drops off the third attempt which was still red and looked nothing like the picture and now it was filled with cucumbers and topped off with large red flakes that I can only describe as looking like fish food or miniature bark chips. So we both decided that we just wanted to abort mission on the drinks and waited for our waiter to come back. But he didnt. It was probably a solid 20-25 minutes before my friend got frustrated and just flagged someone down so we could get the check. It was pretty unbelievable. I mean, if they didn't know how to make the drink, they could have said something, but also, I feel like it's important to mention that they literally had 2 pages of Margaritas, from classic to more elaborate ones like the one my friend ordered and it seems odd to me that they wouldn't have been able to get either one of the ones we ordered right. And I'm not sure why no one came back to give us the check, there were only two other groups of people in the restaurant and though frustrated, we had been really polite and nice about it, as we both have worked in retail/customer service and know what it's like to be on the other side of a poor customer service experience. So it was pretty awful. But the salsa is amazing. So there's...