Fandango Restaurant & Cantina

Poor service when It came to get beer to our table. TOOK FOREVER! Never coming here again…

This is my first Mexican restaurant experience in portland. The place was dead at 6:30pm…that wasn’t a good sign. The good and bad
The good — the salsa, Cadillac margarita and my octopus tostada.
The hubs had the fajitas, he liked but tends to like more blander food than I, I thought they were ok. The chips were the most disgusting thing ever and same with the corn tortillas. Either they use old stuff or their frying grease is off. Service was fast because they were dead. I might try again for the octopus and margarita.

How horrible can you get?
My god.
Seriously.
Stopped in on Father’s Day because we wanted to grab a movie and weren’t too keen on what to eat, just wanted something and it was on the way to the theater. I thought it’d make a good Unilocal!review too. I should have been tipped off that the place was almost completely empty.
This place used to be a PIetro’s Pizza, as I understand it, back in the day. It would have stayed better off being an empty husk of a building. Maybe the service would have been better.
We were seated instantly, at a half-​booth/​half-​table sort of thing… it was pretty awful to be honest. We received a basket of chips and salsa and while I’ll say that the salsa was actually pretty decent, being spicy without too hot, the chips were as stale as stale can get. STALE. STAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALE!
I forget what my girlfriend ordered, but I know that all I ordered was a quesadilla and a beef taco and a beer.
The beer came quickly. I drank all of it. Twenty minutes later I flagged down the waitress, who hadn’t been back at all to check on us, and got another beer.
My girlfriend, having worked at a Mexican restaurant in the past, was unhappy at the amount of time this was taking. Cheese between tortillas, it’s pretty simple, for the quesadilla. And the place was pretty empty at the time.
So we flag the waitress down AGAIN and ask her how long it’s going to take. She comes back and says something along the lines of, the kitchen is busy and it’ll be another fifteen minutes.
Nope.
It doesn’t take forty five minutes to make this kind of food. We threw enough money on the table to cover the beers and left.
I would be suspect of those five star reviews I see here. They smell more like Friends Making a Unilocal!Account To Rave. They fooled us. Our experience was more in line with Erin’s, but at least the money I paid for the beer was worth the product. Oh, and the mariachi music at full blast gets really old really fast.

We tried Fandango tonight for the first time. We had a great experience: the food was very tasty (we had Fiesta del Mar and Mariscada Empapelada) and the service by Laura was FANTASTIC, we really felt welcome. This is a place to try! They have live music on Fridays and DJ music on Saturday. We will be back very soon. Fandango is a great place!!!

If you’re looking for a Tex-​Mex experience, pass this by. It’s about the mariscos (seafood) and a west coast Mexican bar experience. Order things like the ceviches, zarandeado, molcajetes, camarones (shrimp) in various sauces, etc. If I was being entirely honest, I’d give this 4 stars. But since Erin’s review has so totally skewed this place’s score, I’m going with 5.

Bleck!
Oh, you wanted more?
As soon as the «Now Open» banner appeared on this colorful building, I was there. And I was disappointed. The menu is extensive, and the salsa served with the chips is quite tasty, but thats where the good times stop. I tried this place twice, and each time my entrée was bland, and underheated. Water glasses went unfilled the entire meal, and when it was all said and done, the lunch bill for two came to $ 22. About twice what it was worth if you ask me.