Barrio

I've only come to this Barrio on Friday nights when they have DJ and dancing after 11pm. I love the atmosphere, dark and loud. The DJ that plays always mixes up the music. There's a little bit of salsa, top 40s, pop, oldies, it's great! It's nice to come here grab a drink and some food and dance the night away.

I'd like to give this place a better review, but there's no way I can do that.

I called a day in advance to reserve a table for 14 at 9:30 on a Friday night for my sister's bachelorette party and the hostess was very polite and obliging, which got me excited about continuing our celebration here. We arrived about 5 minutes early and were told it would be a while for our table, sigh. We were able to grab a much smaller table and the hostess helped us put chairs around it and we called it good. After a 15 minute wait, we were anxious to get the drinks rolling and one of the girls talked a guy at the next table to buy the bachelorette a shot, which was hilarious to watch. I finally spotted our waitress and asked if I could buy myself and my sister a martini. She asked if my sister was the bachelorette and I said that she was. Then the waitress said they don't allow "that". I asked what they don't allow, and she said "serving people who are clearly intoxicated". What? I was clearly shocked and asked her, "you think she's drunk right now?" (mind you, my sister's eyes were open, she wasn't on the bar shaking her ass, she was sitting in her chair laughing with her friends) It was now 10pm and it was the first we had even seen of our waitress, and my sister had taken one shot since walking in. I told the waitress to come back when she thought it would be acceptable to serve her a drink, until then I wasn't going to order anything from her. Perhaps we just got unlucky with a terrible waitress and while I wanted to usher everyone to the place next door, this was the one bar my sister really wanted to go to, so we stayed, for too long. We were getting ready to go and all of a sudden the waitress showed up with about 10 drink bills (I think 5 people had ordered drinks, and the last one was ordered over an hour ago) and threw them on the table. Most were claimed and paid but I was stuck paying for some drink that cost $15 (we still don't know who it belonged to) and by "paying for" I mean waiting another 20 minutes for her to run my credit card. It's really too bad we got a waitress who clearly needed to stay home that night-fortunately it didn't ruin the night for my sister but it certainly did for me.

The drinks on the menu were extremely overpriced, even for downtown St. Paul, but when I ordered a dirty martini (directly from the bar and not our waitress), it was only $7.

Been to Barrio in Minneapolis and St. Paul. And it's okay but SOOOO overrated.  The portions are SO SMALL for the price. Everybody says how great it is, so I went to the Mpls one, nothing special, small, loud, hate how stuff if brought out as it's ready versus all together. So tried the St. Paul one, seems like a larger space but once again, everything else the same. I can think of tons of other places with same quality of food for a lot less or give a lot more. This is a lot of hype and I think marketed successfully to the point where people think it's something really special. Staff is really nice though. Crazy small portions, if you are hungry, you may want to go somewhere else lol.