Cantina Laredo is a chain with locations in Oklahoma and Ohio, so expecting high quality fare was probably asking a little much. It’s also entirely possible that today’s lunch at is not their fault. It could be one of a thousand things like the economy, Rick Perry’s hair or the fact I may or may not be in a pretty foul mood this week for reason’s that are entirely not the fault of this downtown eatery.

Excuses aside, I still paid for lunch there, and I’m still sorry that I did.

First of all, setting aside bland and over-priced food, let’s discuss the misallocations of resources and priorities that this place seems to be suffering from. From what we can tell, they seem to have constructed a slightly smaller version of the Large Hadron Collider in their basement (the only logical reason the food could possibly cost as much as it does), but instead of trying to create earth-consuming black holes, they are in fact, hard at work searching for the Fajita-Platter-God Particle, the elusive building block behind all Mexican food related physics. This method of building our lunch atom by atom, we hypothesize, is the only way it could have taken so stinking long for our food to appear at our table, and also accounts for the mere five strips of chicken on the plate. And while I appreciate the apparent scientific and military-industrial might that must have gone into creating such ground breaking fare, you can get pretty much the same quality fare at Taco Cabaña, for about $10 cheaper. Actually, that might be an insult to TC.

Also, god knows I’m not one to be a fashion critic here (I regularly show up at the office in t-shirts that I can’t actually deny having slept in), but if you’re going to ask you staff to wear all black, at least get them to wash their damn clothes. The small nest of cat hair on the one waitresses shirt was fine for sitting around watching the bachelorette, but really kind of uncool for the eating-of-food activities we were trying to partake in.

All told, do yourself a favor – walk around the corner to Jo’s and get your self a watermelon and lime aqua fresca –The fajita science experiment is not worth it.