Canteen Bar & Restaurante

My boyfriend and I went here on a whim because we wanted to try someplace new. First the alcohol selection was rather limited for a Mexican restaurant with a "full bar".    No Cointreau or Grand Marnier as an option for margaritas? The margaritas they did have were so so.
We ordered our food and as we were waiting a ROACH crawled out of the bar!!! I was disgusted! Needless to say we cancelled the food order and got out of there. But when we told the bartender what we saw, she had this look like "well what do you want me to do about it?". At this point I just wanted to go so we just paid for the drinks and left. I do not recommend coming here, there are plenty of AWESOME Mexican restaurants downtown, this just isn't one of them.

So far so good - but I'll need to go back again to check out the food due to bad timing.  Went there with a friend on a Sunday evening.  Finding the place was a bit of a deal (FYI, its on the lower level!).  On the way down the stairs we helped a guy who dropped his phone find all of the pieces.  Then we followed him into Canteen and it just so happened to be the manager!  Then we saw the "kitchen closed" sign.  The manager (Emmanuel) told us the kitchen was being renovated for a few days.  He asked us to grab dinner nearby and come back for free drinks so he could make it up to us.  

We took him up on it and ended up meeting more staff.  Everyone was friendly.  Emmanuel makes a mean margarita, and he also tested out some different liqueurs and whatnot on us.  Needless to say, although we were disappointed we didn't get fed there, the drinks were great, the staff was fun, and it got very busy after 11 PM.  We're planning to go back to check out the food.  Looking forward to it!

I have no idea what place some other reviewers are talking about - my experience was hard to find place, not a single soul in from 8:30pm to 9:30pm on a Friday, fruit flies all over, a server who didn't know whether their torta de vegetable was vegetarian, torta made in a burger bun with zucchini and squash - they forgot to put beans or guacamole, and overall a very very mediocre experience with music sometimes so loud you can't hear yourself and suddenly reduced so you're shouting.