Great menu and top notch customer service (Chiquito)

Member Name: Dinah93

Product:	Chiquito
Date:	13/11/09 (84 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely choice of food, big portions, great customer service

Disadvantages: Quite expensive if you go after 5pm

I was very excited when Chiquito's started building a restaurant near me, I love mexican but there is something of a lack around where I live, and I was missing my regular fix since moving house.

My review is based on Chiquitos at Teesside Park, although with being a large chain restauraunt I'm sure a lot of the same policies apply.

The restauraunt itself is large and spacious, with an interior based on a Mexica/Cowboy theme. There are red walls, and a lot of rustic wooden style seating and tables. There are also a lot of wagon wheels and cacti pictures, but this is balanced by modern lighting and some funky pictures to stop the place seeming twee.

I've now been 4 or 5 times on an evening, and not once has there been less than three quarters of the tables taken, so clearly its a busy place. On a Saturday we've had to wait an hour for a table before.

The menu is great, very varied. There are a lot of mexican options such as enchilladas, fajitas and the like, and you can customise these to your taste, having them with rice, chips, salsa, guacamole and so on. You can also choose the type of meat or vegetables to go with it.

My favourite starter is defintiely the sweet potato, while I'm a bit of a traditionalist and tend to stick to the fajitas for the main, which come hot and sizzling on a platter to your table. You get plenty of filling on these, and I can never finish it all.

For those who don't like their food spicy (although, in reality its more flavoursome at Chiquitos than spicy), there is also a range of roasted chicken, burgers, and a nice beer battered fish to choose from, as well as lots of veggie options.

They used to do refillable drinks, but unfortunately this has stopped now. I do think its a shame as it can add £5 or £10 to our bill, which makes me think of it as a much more expensive dinner. Prices are fairly reasonable, but there are rarely offers on, so expect to pay about £40 for a 3 course meal for 2 people, with only soft drinks. To be honest, I do find this expensive for a chain restauraunt, and their are some excellent local restaurants we can eat at a lot cheaper.

If you arrive before 5pm there is a very good daytime special, where you can get 3 courses for £12.95. A lot of the menu is covered on this, so I think this is well worth doing for the price.

The reason we come back is the customer service. It's absolutely fantastic. We once ordered two mains, and my partners enchilladas were too spicy for him, they swapped them for another item on the menu, free of charge, without a second thought. We were impressed as the only thing that was wrong with it was that it wasn't to his taste. On another occassion my tortillas were overdone and burnt at the edges, and the coke syrup was very weak, and they just wrote off the entire bill for us, including the starters, and offered us desserts and coffees on the house.

While as a rule I prefer local to chain restauraunts, the service I have recieved here has been good enough to make an exception for, and I hope to continue to be a happy, frequent customer in the future.

Summary: I'll definitely be back.