Guzman Y Gomez Taqueria, Newtown, Sydney, Australia

This may be Sydney's best Mexican, I'll never know... I'll continue to go to The Chocolate Dog down on South King St whenever I feel like Mexican...

Why? Well, as usual, there's a story...

My girlfriend, who loves mexican food but can't find much in Sydney to match even the usual street corner fare in The Mission in San Francisco, had been waiting anxiously for this new Mexican Taqueria to open on King St in Newtown. At today was the day! So we roll up at 12:45 for lunch, and there's two staff members out the front handing out menus telling everyone "we open in 10 minutes" - "Excellent", we think, looking forward to being the first customers. So we form a queue, attract the attention of a crowd of people who join the queue. Ten minutes later they tell us "only 5 more minutes! We'll open at 1pm!"... "OK", we think... At 1pm the boss Steven comes to the front window to talk to the crowd "We'll be opening in 10 minutes!" he tells us. Hmmm... There's 10 or 15 staff inside, all giving themselves a round of applause... At 1:15, after having been again told "five more minutes" and a little later "open in 10 minutes" they're still not letting anyone in. At 1:25, Rachel goes and asks whats going on, telling them "we'll have to go elsewhere in about 5 minutes" (this is because I'm getting quite grumpy at them by now). At 1:30 I give up, call the nearest staff member to the window and ask her to tell her boss that he's blown it, that lying to excited potential customers is disrespectful, and reflects poorly on their attitudes towards their customers...

I can only interpret what went on in two ways. The optimist in me thinks they're just completely clueless about customer service and about running a restaurant. It was just an oversight to leave a queue of cistomers outside waiting while they had empty tables and chairs waiting inside. That their 45+ minutes worth of "it'll just be 10 minutes" and "we'll be ready in five minutes!" was just due to their inexperience in getting their kitchen ready to go. The pessimist in me feels we were being cynically used - as soon as the boss realised he had a queue of people holding up the footpath traffic on a Saturday afternoon in Newtown causing a scene, he intentionaly left us all out there so passersby would see...

Personally, it makes little difference which of those two explanations is true, I'm not going to eat in a restaurant run by either of the two possible versions of the management.

So, maybe it'll be good, they certainly write a tasty sounding menu, but my advice is to go to the Chocolate Dog down the south end of King St - there's people who make Mexican food there in the evenings, and although they don't blow their own "great food" trumpet nearly as loudly as this new place does, they do know how to treat their customers. The staff their are friendly and accomodating, they remember you and they warmly greet friends you bring that they haven't seen before. Their Fajitas are great, and although they don't allways have the Tamales available, when they do they're really good!