My wife and I ate at the Kent Azteca this past Wednesday, June 30, 2010. We've been there a couple times before. We never thought too much about the place - nothing especially good or bad about it - but its one of the closest Tex-Mex places to our home, so that's where we go.
Tonight, unfortunately, this restauraunt managed to distinguish itself in the worst possible way, and we absolutely will never set foot in the place again. Or any Azteca for that matter.
The meal itself was the usual, pretty much the same as you could get anywhere. I had a chimichanga, and my wife had some sort of shrimp thing that she likes. And about three-quarters of the way into the meal, my wife noticed that there was a lump in the corner of the napkin in her lap. Turns out is was a freshly-chewed wad of gum. It was in there in a way that you could easily miss it. We weren't even sure that that was what it was, but I had to go and take a sniff - ugh - and yup: spearmint.
I didn't make a scene or anything like that: I understand that things can happen. I caught the attention of a passing employee - the woman who brought us our water - and showed her what the problem was, and why we were no longer interested in our food. The woman looked at it, said something like "oh, this shouldn't be here" and walked off.
WTF?
She did come back a bit later and said that the manager was going to drop by, but we never saw him or her. Somebody else - not our waiter - came by with the check (the waiter, I guess, preferred not to deal with it, so handed it off to his buddy). And we paid, and we left - all staff seemed to avoid eye-contact.
After I saw the freshly used gum in the napkin on our table, I began to notice other things. The carpet of food on the floor, the greasy look of the chairs and tables, the dirt around the windows ... this place is a health hazard. And judging by the way they reacted to a chewed-up wad of gum on a customer's table, it is apparent that Azteca management has completely forgotten that they have competition.
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