Unsolicited Picky Review of El Mercado (Burnet)

So, my SO and I wanted to try out our neighborhood businesses, keep the money in the general area, that sort of thing.  We frequent Margarita's on North Loop frequently (which,  by the way,  is a friendly, standard Tex-Mex place with strong margaritas and some really really yummy fajitas with truckloads of veggies and meat, if you're into that sort of thing, for a reasonable price), so we thought, "Hey, let's try El Mercado for something besides drinks...maybe we'll like it better than Margarita's."

Um, well, no.

First of all, the food was on the whole $2-$3 more per entree than at other places.   I am willing to pay that for good stuff, so we went ahead and ordered the shrimp fajitas.  Meanwhile, we supped on tortilla chips and some unexciting ketchupy salsa with no discernable bite to it.  When the shrimp fajitas ($10.95 for one person) came out, I was dismayed to see exactly six small shrimp and sauteed onions.  That's it.  No peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, or what have you, just six shrimp and onions.  When the waitress saw my face, she asked if she could do anything, and I asked about the lack of peppers or other vegetables.  She said that she could go get me some green pepper sauteed up, so I said "OK."  She returned a couple of minutes later with a tiny bowl of sauteed peppers (diced, straight from the fridge and thrown on a grill for MAYBE 10 seconds), and while they improved it somewhat, I was still extremely disappointed with the taste and size of the portions.

The kicker was that, when the bill came, she charged me .50 for the peppers.  (Now I KNOW that this is not a big deal, that she probably had nothing to do with the charging, that she could have been rude about it, yada yada yada, but I really thought that was tacky.)  The rest of the visit­-the mediocre to bland quality of the overpriced food, the loud and frat-boyish decor, and the only passable margaritas--would probably have been enough to keep me away from there, but the teeny little detail of charging me for the damn peppers cemented it.

There, I've vented.

Margaret