Perhaps this place doesn't really deserve three stars. But it suffers from the oft-told syndrome of "5 star food and 1 star service."
Although the tag I had to give this restaurant was Salvadoran, the specialty here is Guatemalan food like its brother Atitlan across the street. So the pupusas and curtido are serviceable, and at least there are some of them in this area, but the pipian de pollo and jocom de pollo, a pumpkin-seed red sauce with chayote and a lime-green tomatillo sauce with green vegetables respectively, are outstanding and the tortillas thick and rich tasting. The tamarindo water beverage is refreshing. It would be more so, though, if you didn't have to order a drink.
Which is the first issue. I was not sure if I wanted a fruit drink, so I asked for water for now. The reply... "we don't have water."
...yeah.
I don't know a single restaurant in this city that doesn't offer water as a beverage. There are some that charge for bottled water and I still strongly dislike that when almost everyone else offers it for free. Even Atitlan has water on the table and so there isn't really a reason for this place to not do so if it wants to stand up to Atitlan's direct competition. Unless they were trying to say their water machine was broken, then not having water available is an utterly ridiculous proposition.
Perhaps in the future I should ask before ordering and then leave without ordering if I get denied, but my restaurant.com certificate was rejected at the register. The cited reason was that the ownership changed in January or February and the name changed to "Delicias Latinas, Inc." which makes it a different company that has not agreed to honor the certificate. The manager said the listing was restaurant.com's problem and not his and that we should ask restaurant.com to refund the certificate. However, we eventually agreed that it is clearly the manager's responsibility to contact restaurant.com in order to discontinue participation in the program. Especially because the manager said someone else had attempted to use a certificate a few *weeks* ago, yet he still did nothing about it. After we refused an initial offer of 10% off the meal, we eventually were given $5 off our meal for the inconvenience instead of the $10 the certificate was actually worth. Still, my friend who came here with me also for the first time left quite justifiably angry.
Fortunately, as a postscript, restaurant.com re-credited my certificate purchase to my account with extra as compensation and will be contacting the restaurant to resolve the issue.
In the meantime, if you still have a restaurant.com certificate for Delicias Latinas, go exchange it for something else so this doesn't happen to you, and you can just enjoy the delicious homemade Guatemalan food with major bang for the buck and feel more comfortable about supporting a clearly mom-and-pop business.
Because that is the sort of restaurant Houston does best. read more