Bel Air Cantina

I've been here twice.  The first time I walked about after being ignored at the bar for over ten minutes.  The second time we were seated promptly.  Service was a little better.  Still took a long time to get a soda.  Food was average.  

For those who enjoy blended margaritas, do not go here.  They do not offer them.  The server told me the margaritas they make are from scratch, unfortunately, it was terrible.  

Bel Air opened only a few weeks ago so I suspect it will get slightly better.  Need more bartenders and some management presence.  

I

FOOD.
The food was OK for the price. This means that I'm paying a lot for tacos, but I'm still very aware that I'm paying kind of a lot for tacos. I felt weirdly (i.e. uncomfortably) full afterwards, but I didn't really eat that much. It was a strange feeling, but I can't totally blame the restaurant--maybe I had a virus. Whatever. Food's just OK, in my opinion.

SERVICE & ATMOSPHERE.
Now, the service and atmosphere of the restaurant: needs major improvement. The host I spoke to gave me a wait time of 10 minutes, and they notify you when your table is ready by sending a text message (odd, I thought, considering the waiting area is small and we can be easily notified by the host simply calling our names). We never got a text about our table. After about 15 minutes I went to ask the host and was told my notification was sent. Well, sorry--it wasn't. And hey guess what: no apology from the host. That's customer service 101. If you can't apologize for your failure, you should not be host at a restaurant.

Once we're seated, we get chips and salsa right away. The chips and salsa are pretty dang good...maybe the most impressive part of the whole dining experience. We put in a drink order. We then wait about 10 minutes for drinks, which arrive long after we've decided on our entrees. We finally place our order. The food arrives maybe 20-25 minutes later. Not the worst wait time I've ever experienced, but let me remind you: I'm waiting for tacos. Way too long a wait for tacos.

PROGNOSIS.
The restaurant is understaffed at peak hours. We were there around 5pm on a Saturday, so obviously it's going to be busy. There was a heavy family influx, which for Tosa is not surprising. But the restaurant should really expect this. They should be overstaffed, rather than understaffed. There appeared to be a lot of very young, inexperienced wait staff. I witnessed one wait staff chatting with a couple friends/acquaintances for no less than 5 minutes while he probably should have been tending to his tables. The overall vibe appears to be: "hey we don't give a shit if you eat here or not. we are too cool to give a shit."

The waiter who helped us wasn't rude or otherwise bad, but overall we felt like we weren't waited on with very much attention. In reality she was probably just too busy to give any of her tables the kind of attention they should receive when you're paying $12 for a taco meal.

I doubt I'll ever go back for dinner. The drinks are good and somewhat reasonably priced, so maybe I'll go back for drinks. The bar is enormous.

I should mention that I don't normally post reviews like this, but I really WANT to like this restaurant. It's close to my house and it would be wonderful if I could go here and enjoy myself. So I hope the restaurant owner/managers will read these reviews and take the patron advice. I would love to come back, but I don't want to deal with such poor service.

Let's do this list style.

Pros:
- $2 tacos (barbacoa is tasty!) and mystery tequila shots
- Friendly, and only friendly (see below), servers
- Spanish audio tapes in the bathroom. I learned how to say "I hope your son has a lot of money" or something like that.
- Close to my house

And where do I begin for the negatives?
- No silverware (twice now on separate occasions) until AFTER food arrives and after we remind them
- Forgot friend's guac which took another 10+ minutes
- 15 minute wait for a diet coke
- Requested an inside table (and we were fine with the longer wait) and were seated outside. At this point, it had been over an hour so we just took what we could.
- Speaking of tables, there was an empty table inside that sat for seriously 25-30 minutes (probably longer since we were taken away to be seated outside). See photo.
- On our last visit, ALL of our tacos had sat too long before being brought out to us that they all fell apart. We ended up using forks and knives for our tacos....wut.
- Ordered a burrito to-go once and it was wrapped as if the person had no thumbs.
- Seems like 90% of the people who work here are so slow and unmotivated.
- One bartender didn't even look in my direction when taking my order. He just grunted and proceeded to salt rim some glasses.
- Overheard several servers shouting "what're you doing out of the kitchen?!"
- Workers taking spending their bathroom breaks texting/whatever on their phones. I walked in and a guy looked up right at me and thought he got caught, pocketed his phone and started to pretend to wash his hands before getting back to work, haha!

Long story short: check it out if you really want but I wouldn't go out of my way until the place gets some better staff and works out their kinks. Lots of kinks.