El Charrito's-Helena's Original Restaurante

I've loved this restaurant for years. I no longer live nearby, but my grandparents would take us here every time we stayed the night as kids. I was in town today and able to swing by for takeout and it was perfect and just as I remembered. The food is delicious.

Love this place, great food. Always a favorite place to eat. But the last time I was there my credit card was charged 5.00 more than it should've been. The bill was 15.15 and I left a 3.00 tip, so the bill should've only been 18.76 with the 3.99% fee for using credit card, but I was charged on my card for 23.76. I am pretty sure that the tip amount was changed from 3.00 to 8.00 by the waitress. My sister-in-law's bill was 3.00 more than it should've been. I also had a fraudulent charge on my card a week later. My niece recognized our waitress as someone she used to work with and knew she had embezzled money from her former employer, so she looked it up on line and found that barely over 2 yrs ago she was convicted and jailed for embezzling a very, very large sum of money. I know this is a family run business, but family or not, I don't think this is very responsible of them to hire people with that type of criminal history to handle people's debit/credit cards or cash at all, especially if they are still on probation. I did inform the owner, hopefully this doesn't continue to happen in the future to anyone else.

The food here has become really inconsistent. Sometimes I love it, other times it's simply too runny: the tacos have excess sauce that soaks into the taco shell, the tamales are falling apart with the liquid, the fajitas have excess sauce that soaks the tortilla, etc. Also, the beef stew is gristly more often than not these days.

I used to like their tamales, fajitas, tacos, taquitos, beef stew, and the El Jefe.

Really tasty and consistent food. Have dined here for years. Can get noisy and TVs are distracting unless that's what you like while eating. Wait staff is friendly, prices are fair.

Food is great once you finally get it over an hour later..and don't dare order dessert cause that's an extra 30 minutes. And that's when there are only 3 tables of customers in the restaurant. Came here several times with family still have yet to get a good waitress which is sad considering the food is good. I will not be returning until I here they restart or retrain.

The food is quite good. The restaurant itself is quite small and can get crowded. There is no alcohol served.