Costa Vida

The food was great! Even my little boy, who is a VERY picky eater, ate his kids meal. My only issue is the meat portions. I had a small nacho with sweet pork. I could barley taste the sweet pork. They were good nachos, but don’t be so stingy on the meat!

Ordered nachos and got a serving that looked like it was 4 hrs or more old, warmed up. The chicken was really salty and the cheese looked fried. Very disappointing.

I arrived at 8:30 last night. By appearances, the service I received was very different from the service that I saw other customers receive. At first, I was warmly greeted, but as soon as I ordered, The first guy who was preparing my chicken quesadilla assembled it as quickly as possible, put it on the grill, and coldly told me to «have a nice day.» After waiting five minutes watching my food burn, the next worker with the name Jose on his tag reluctantly grabbed my food, asked me if I wanted rice, and was annoyed when I answered. Then he started to package my food and gave me another dirty look when I asked for some sour cream. I was being polite and courteous up until I was paying for my food. My demeanor changed when it became painfully obvious that I was being laughed at by the young female cashier and Jose. After paying, I asked for a survey and they pretended like they were busy and ignored me. I am a transgender woman with a deep voice and I regretfully suspect this impacted my experience. I love the food but am not sure I will return to this location as I don’t feel welcome here.

No corn tortillas. One of the line food preparers (is that a word?) Wouldn’t speak, just pointed. Someone from the back took the trash through the front door. 3^rd time I asked them to scan my rewards card and they tell me nothing is on it, which leads me to believe I’ve not collected any rewards the last 3 times I’ve been here. I don’t know what’s going on with this Costa Vida. I love their food but this location has issues.

Very good food and such a courteous staff! My mother is in fact a celiac and this establishment is very considerate of her needs!

I much prefer Costa Vida over Café Rio. Costa Vida is smaller than Café Rio which allows them to move through their customers faster. Their staff seems more relax which= better interaction with customers. I have never had an bad experience at this location, I am suprise that this restaurant didn’t get better reviews.

Usually they have quality food but this time showed me the staff really doesn’t care about putting out bad food and just wants you to go away. Normally I get a pork salad and it’s great, and the staff is sort of irritable, but this time the pork was foul, I told them and they scoffed and said it was fine, give him his money back instead of offering something different, and she rudely did. They don’t give a crap if they have foul food, they just want you buy your food and get the f out. Tried to call their manager to ask about it and they hung up on me, so I complained to their main contact with the receipt number. Really poor treatment of a regular happy customer, they treated me like a traitor.

This place makes café Rio a five star restaurant. The food SUCKS. The service sucks. I am surprised that they don’t charge for taking your order or the napkins. They charge FOR EVERYTHING. No wonder it is empty.

I’ve really enjoyed Costa Vida as one of ‘those’ people with gluten issues. Whenever I’m in the store, everyone is really helpful and takes great care to wash their hands and ensure no cross-​contamination.
WARNING: If ordering over the phone, beware. The one time I tried, only a few weeks ago, I mentioned gluten-​free no less than four times on the phone. When picking up the order I made sure to mention gluten-​free again… twice. All times I was assured that my meal was gluten-​free. Well… I should have checked the food, but I was in a hurry. Turns out my meal was made with regular flour tortillas and I found out when I bit into it (enchiladas covered in cheese and sauce so I couldn’t tell visually). Did I get sick? Yes. Frustrating.

My kids love Costa Vida. My 15-​year-​old is gluten sensitive and she really likes their salads. The other two are down with this place, too. We’ve been to nearly a dozen different locations throughout our travels. Last Friday night, we ended up at this location.
It’s was approaching 9:00 PM. The East Sandy location is pretty much boarded up by that point. Not here, they were still going strong. Ended up with four meals plus I took the little survey from my phone and received a complimentary tres leches something or other.
The food was fresh, the containers were full, the taste was delicious. Staff were a lot of fun and the manager was the bomb!
Just noticing all the one star reviews. Wow. This brand isn’t my favorite. I actually prefer Café Rio if it boils down to one or the other but my kids like it and Café Rio employees are atrocious! I think haters are going to hate and I would surmise that given this place’s location, there are more haters here than elsewhere. I’m not a Costa Vida «expert» but I’ve been to enough locations (some much more frequently than others) to recognize that this location is one of their better ones. Perhaps if I frequented this location as much as I do others, I’d have a lower opinion. Given where I live and work, that’s unlikely to ever happen.
I was impressed with how well this place was run and how nice the experience was, so much so that I am leaving a seemingly meaningless and redundant review of a franchise on Unilocal!
Thank you. Thank you very much!

This place has turned around! They got a new manager who was very nice to us. I did notice the slow service by one of the guys, but since it was their first day with a new manager I think I can give them a break haha. I think it will just get faster and faster from here.
They also brought around key lime pie samples for everyone!
And I’d mentioned it was my mom’s birthday so after our meal he brought our a free dulce dessert! SO kind! It really made her day!
Definitely nice atmosphere and interior, and have outdoor seating and lots of parking :)

This is gonna be a no star, but I guess I have to put one. So Walked in and there’s three people behind the counter, one guy partially makes my salad with a tortilla and pork then he quits, guess it’s outta his zone. So I sat there watching nothing happen with everyone’s food. The dude behind the counter proceeds too start «cleaning» the counter with who know what’s on the rag, then kneels down rag in hand lays it on the ground and ties his shoe with his «sterile gloves». Then he continues wiping the counter dragging his out dated rag through the beans and rice and meat. Finally he stuck his nasty gloved thumb in my neglected, pork tortilla Petri dish, and slid it down the line. The closing to this story is I walked out and never looked back. My hunger was turned to disgust, and now here I am with an empty stomach. Thanks guys. Café rio would slay you on their worst day.

Really? Charge extra for beans and rice? Charge extra for sour cream? And you Want me to tip your employees? Study your competitors, you guys are greedy.

Not impressed at all by this type of food and would never go there of my own volition (nor have I ever been in any of the restaurants, including this one), but the salad I had from there was the first thing I’ve had from any of these types of chains that was actually decent. I’m far from wanting to make it a habit, but the raspberry chipotle flavoring on the chicken, while sweet, wasn’t bad and the tomatillo cilantro dressing is still pretty decent.
The atrocious key lime pie was a complete throwaway and quite awful, but, once again, where Costa Vida stands above the other chains of this type is their ability to actually get orders out correctly as ordered. For some reason, this seems to be a hard thing for all of their other competitors, as it has happened exactly never at all the other places.

This location and the employees are far off from giving good customer service, Costa vida is OVER RATED, they gave me such a hard time over asking for a SMALL container of sauce. They charge 50 cent for such a tiny portion. If you want good food for a decent price DON’T GO TO COSTA VIDA go to CAFE RIO. Their large salads are 7.00 and good size container of sauce. Costa vida charges that for a small.
And not too mention how creepy the manager and employees were. It’s like they picked up a few people from the homeless shelter and just gave them a job without proper training. Please help this location improve!!! Too bad we can’t get Gordon Ramsay involved.

There were 3 people in front of me waiting to get a tortilla started. But it took 30 minutes to get a salad. Nobody was ordering multiple items. They were out of everything, which I heard someone else comment on when they were out of the bigger containers, chips, shrimp, etc, all of which tells me a lot of it is a management problem.
I realize they have a bunch of teenagers. So does every other fast food place. I’ve never seen a costa vida that slow, and while there were at least 5 employees there, they had no idea how or no desire to work together. Half of them were just standing around. I heard one tell another that he should’ve had the shrimp ready 20 minutes ago.
Because they didn’t have the larger containers, one employee was reminded several times that the 2 containers were one salad.
I would’ve understood if the line was wrapped around and/​or they actually looked collectively busy. But neither of those applied.

I come here once in a blue moon for a sweet pork salad or a sweet pork smothered burrito with raspberry chipotle sauce. This sauce they have was touched by Jesus himself. SERIOUSLY. I’m absolutely hooked. I can’t have a burrito without this sauce. Go try it — Go try it now.

So I was in Salt Lake City with work and was jonesing hard for some Mexican food. We were short on time and couldn’t find the local taqueria that was supposed to be in the area. We saw Coast Vida and gave it a shot.
If you’re a passionate fan of Texas or New Mexico Mexican food like me, we have biased ideas of what it looks, smells, and tastes like. For my friends in Texas, Costa Vida tries to compete with Freebirds or Chipotle. For my Colorado friends Costa Vida is like a Qdoba…
The set-​up is similar to the locations listed above. You go through the line and choose your dish and how you want it dressed. I chose a steak salad and my co-​worker chose pork enchiladas. The seasoning is more Central American (think pollo de res or pulled pork tacos from El Salvador) than Tex-​Mex or green chile New Mexican. The spices and seasoning were good on the steak. Just could have used more than what was in the salad. My friend really enjoyed his pork enchiladas and they were sweeter than expected.
We had chips and queso as well. The chips were fresh and crisp. The queso needed some more heat for my taste.
Costa Vida is decent quick Cental American cooking for the price. My problem with them is I was looking for good Taco pastor or tacos asada w/​cilantro and onions. Costa Vida provides a different taste than accustomed to in Texas. It’s better than Chipotle and runs behind Freebirds. It just wasn’t the greasy Taco pastor or Taco Asada I was craving…
I’ll give them a try again when I go back to the SLC area.