El Torito Laguna Hills

My friend and I came here for 4th of July, as options are limited with most places being closed for the holiday. The hostess spoke broken English and was hard to understand, which should have been our 1st clue to get out of here. We asked the hostess ifshe had a gluten free menu, and she replied that if we wanted happy hour we had to sit in the bar, so either she could notunderstand us or just didn't bother to listen. So once seated we asked our waitress what on the menu was gluten free. She saidnothing was gluten free. We asked her to please check with the chef because we were shocked. We have never been anywhere thatdidn't even have 1 gluten free option on the menu. Our waitress also had a thick accent and was hard to understand, so wethought maybe it was just a miscommunication. But she came back and said she checked with the kitchen and nothing they have isgluten free. She said not even a salad because the dressings have gluten. So we had to just leave. Its really sad that theycan't even put 1 single item on their menu to accommodate gluten free diets, since such a large amount of people have glutenallergies.

The service was excellent! The food was adequate for the price. Bathrooms on premises and plenty of free parking.

There weren’t ample enough food, silverware or plates during our dining experience. When we were up getting food, after placing our drink order, our table was double booked and given to an alternate family. The wait staff was tremendous and did everything they could to provide a nice Father’s Day brunch. But it seems they were understaffed.

Terrible experience. Will not visit an El torito again. Reservation meant nothing. Too many people not enough food at buffet or service at table. Tried to put us outside at dirty uneven matched tables. They said they did not guarantee an inside table for the reservation. Not worth $36 per person. Buffet not staffed well and long lines.

We had a horrible experience. Sunday brunch. It started where we were seated outside on a table with an half inch of dirt on it. Manager had to come and clean it. Then the shade we had was taken away from us and given to another table.she then tried to move us to another dirty table with a ton of flies I refused and said no please find us a table inside. She did but we didn’t get a waited on for 25 min. The food lines were long by the time you got to the food it was either gone or cold. Just a horrible experience. I will never go back. I will continue to post about this experience. I spoke with the manager she did not seem to care.