When I first got to St Louis 30 years ago with the Air Force I was not impressed with this restaurant. I considered them quite lazy in the way that they did Mexican food as I am from Chicago with a heavily weighted Hispanic culture. I found their food to be bland and somewhat candied to the American palate. Over the years they have evolved in the same way that the St Louis Hispanic culture has grown and thrived. This has created a competitive market and I do believe that El maguey has stepped up to the challenge. On this visit I ordered carnitas which if you want to rate a Mexican restaurant you first need to see if they even offer carnitas. If they do not then you should walk away. Carnitas take time and patience to make correctly. El maguey to me has leveled up and stepped up their game and for that I am very happy to give them my business. And you should too.
We’ve ordered here for 2 years. The quality is always good, service is excellent, and great value for the portions!
I went in and got a chicken chimichanga expecting it to have shredded chicken in it like is usually does. Once I got my order and took one bite out of it, it was an entire chicken breast not shredded at all. It made the chimichanga hard to eat and it was tasteless. I didn’t eat anything on my plate after the first bite and was still forced to pay for the food even though I didn’t eat it and I offered to pay a portion of the price for them making it but the refused and said even if I didn’t eat it I still had to pay the whole $13 for my meal. My brother got the Chile verde and it was good but my order was not.
Called ahead & was told they could accommodate a party of 6. I am Understanding things happen and there wasn’t a table right away, then we asked how long we would have to wait and were ignored by the staff……….
Place doesn't even deserve the 1 star I'm giving. We walked in they seated us, we asked for a high chair, that we ended up having to find ourselves. 4 other groups walked in after us, they were all seated. Recieved chips, and drinks before we got anything. We asked for extra small bowls for salsa. We had to ask more than once for some cheese dip. We have been to multiple Mexican restaurants all over the united States literally and have never not been able to order what my fiance gets. We were even willing to pay however much for the steak on the side.P s. They also use windex to clean their tables....
We have eaten here before and enjoyed it, but the service has gone downhill. We waited for our server to take our order for over thirty minutes and eventually left after he took orders from other tables that arrived after us. Apparently if you don't order alcohol they don't care about your business. There are plenty of other good Mexican restaurants to visit instead.
Right off the start the menu had salsa all over it and I got it on my hands. We ordered a tamale plate and a combination plate. The main complaint is that there was so much liquid in the plate, all of the food was soggy and pretty inedible. You can judge by the pictures we couldn't finish it. When they asked if we wanted to go plates, we said no and we didn't even touch the tacos. I won't go there anymore. My two beers in the bottle and margarita were good.
Right off the start the menu had salsa all over it and I got it on my hands. We ordered a tamale plate and a combination plate. The main complaint is that there was so much liquid in the plate, all of the food was soggy and pretty inedible. You can judge by the pictures we couldn't finish it. When they asked if we wanted to go plates, we said no and we didn't even touch the tacos. I won't go there anymore. My two beers in the bottle and margarita were good.
Service was terrible. Ordered white queso sauce to go with chips. It was brought to us cold. Then we waited and waited for server to come and take our order. Server disappeared from sight for awhile after taking it.. Note there were only two other tables with customers when we got there and only two more tables while we were there. The staff was not slammed. The server finally brought our food. Beef nachos. There were more than four nachos that were burnt on the edges. The meat was bland. The sauce was so thin and watery (basically tasteless) that I had to move chips around to find it on bottom of plate. When server finally came around to ask how food was we told him it wasn't good and why. His response was that it was from the grease of meat.Note: we did not ask for refund because we did eat some of it while waiting for server to come back in sight. He did not offer one. We asked for check and he returned maybe 15-20 minutes later with check.Second Note: this was not our first visit and we always enjoyed it. We will not be at that location again.The server acted like he didn't care whether we were there or not. He also did not care that we were unhappy.
The food was incredible (I had carnitas) and they are good size portions. They aren't stingy when they make your drinks, either. The peach margarita was notably boozy and amazing!