El Patio Cantina - Simi Valley

Food is pretty good. Your service is either very good or very bad here depending on who you get as your server. The bad one is some heavy set bald dude with a mustache who apparently doesn’t know what customer service is. Everyone else seems to be very good at it. The atmosphere can be a bit dark (literally). Sometimes the bar feels like a dungeon b/c all the light are off and the A/C is probably set to low. This place has potential, just not the right combination.

The atmosphere was okay. But I had an 'uh-oh ' moment within a minute of being seated when one of the waitresses was extremely sullen. We ordered a few Margaritas and a big plate of Nachos. Things started to go downhill from there. In between the meal, me and my cousin wanted to smoke a cigarette and after informing our waiter we went outside for a few minutes. When we got back someone from the wait staff thought we were done and put all the used napkins and straw paper on the plate of Nachos. We informed Caesar (the man who was attending to us) that the Nachos was ruined because of no fault of ours. Caesar, instead of apologising, tells us that the Nachos were nearly complete and it can 't be justified to give us a replacement!! Then he tried to insinuate that we were the ones who had put the used Napkins in our plate of Nachos to get free food! We were stunned by what he said, paid our bill (without any tip) and left the restaurant to never ever step foot in it ever again. Avoid this establishment unless you 're dying of hunger. It lacks scruples.

I love Mexican restaurants that provide free chips and salsa and El Patio does. We added on the chorizo bean dip, which could use more chorizo, but is still good. The grilled fish tacos are really good! Big! A great value. Check out photos on Yelp) I will definitely order this again. Other ordered basic combinations and they were good/average, what you'd expect. Drinks are good. Service was a little slow, but OK considering it was midweek, I get being minimally staffed. El Patio may not be the best Mexican restaurant in Simi, but it's good and worthy of a visit. I'll definitely go back.

Sorry for the 3 stars but we sat outside, and the chairs was so uncomfortable that we couldnt enjoy our dinner.

I ordered the steak picado, and it was delicious. The Cadillac margarita that Cesar and Luis made were great. The only thing that was unpleasant was the heat; they didn't have the AC on.