MARIA BONITA CANTINA — Restaurant in Williamsburg

On vacation in town and wife was hungry for fajitas, scoured the options, and living in the desert southwest and Central America for many years, chose the least assuming of the typical smothered and covered east coast options. Upon entering the nearly empty restaurant asked to sit 3 feet from the front door, chose a table in the back of the small room, next to a pink kiddie pool aptly collecting water from the leaking air conditioner on the roof? So far so good! I later learned the waitress upon our choosing the pool side table produced a grand eye roll and a few choice words under her breath! Awesome feels like Iam back in Puerto Jimenez! Ordered drinks, and my heart is all a flutter as they have quarts of familiar! For $7?! Be still my thirsty heart! Wife orders a margarita, which she said was wonderful. Chips arrive; and they are made from stone ground corn! Who Hoo, the salsa in however americanos ( insert sad face) but as I look to my right what do I see? SALSA BAR! And the verde is smokin good! We order appetizers - table side guacamole, which is excellent, and chicken tamales, which are hands down the best tamales I have ever had in my 52 year life. As someone who works with food professionally and have for 35 years, I feel from deep in my being a tear starting to break loose deep inside my culinary soul. We order dinner, steak tacos, chicken fajitas, taco salad, all of which were ok. The tamales, familial, and pool side dining however will be forever etched in my most treasured East coast Mexican restaurant dining...

Let’s start off with the positive. This is the best Mexican food I’ve ever eaten. The fried beef chimichangas were delicious. The rice and beans were fantastic. The salsa was incredibly unique and tasty. When I say the food was amazing, I truly mean it. Now let’s talk a bit about the issues. The service was just not good. Our waitress was very nice, but she was simply stretched far too thin. She was covering every table in the restaurant while another waitress helped bring out drinks, food, and chips. I waited for about 15 minutes for her to notice my cup was empty. When she didn’t notice I was running on empty, I asked for a refill. It was roughly another 15 minutes before I finally got my drink. When we’d had our food for about 10 minutes, another member of my group had to point out that their son did not get his meal. She really could’ve used some help. The atmosphere was another point of pain. The music was extremely loud. I understand the loudness of the music is subjective, but when you can’t carry on a conversation with the person beside you, it’s too loud. It was really quite hot in the restaurant as well. It’s a small location; when you get a lot of people in the room, and there is a kitchen whipping up orders, it’s going to get warm. It was just a bit too spicy for my liking, and I’m not talking about the food. Overall, I wish the service and atmosphere had been better because the food was killer. Would I go again…absolutely, but I’d probably stick a bottle of Sprite and a hand fan in my backpack...

Presentation: Restaurant is presentable, although it’s small it is clean and organized. Very nice decor and choice of colors!

Food: The food, on a scale from 1-10 would deserve at most a 5. Once brought to the table it served good looks but the tortillas were cold and the meat warm not hot. We ordered a variety of tacos and shrimp fajitas. The fajitas were blacken enough for you to get a taste of the grill and showered with too much salt. From the multiple tacos we ordered the best were the tongue tacos. They were cooked to its point and the flavor was definitely there. The rest of the meats were either lacking in flavor, had too much blackened flavor or was just dry. For the tacos, I would not recommend doubling up on the tortilla. They’re a great size, do not break easily, and most of the meat stays on while eating.

Staff: There were two ladies while our visit and both were very nice and attentive. We had a small mixup -what was one thing to us was another to them but they were slow to anger and quit to fix the problem. They understood and were...