There are some restaurants that you just don't go to. Maybe you don't go to them because they're further than you'd like to drive, but – admit it – there are some in your neighborhood, like the restaurant a few blocks away that you have just never been to. It just isn't in your list of possibilities. You might not be able to say anything bad about it, but you don't want to go there, either.

I have a restaurant like this near me. Actually, it's one neighborhood over from mine, a branch of a chain of Mexican restaurants that I happen to like quite a lot. A big part of the reason I like the chain is that the one in my neighborhood had a great chef and was one of its original restaurants. The reason I'm saying "was" is that the restaurant's lease recently expired and, due to a huge spike in the rent, they opted not to renew it. Twenty plus years of good Mexican food and memories – gone.

When I discovered that the place had shut its doors, I was actually standing just outside of them. After I read the notice announcing their closure, as well as the notice announcing the grand opening of its replacement, I decided that I might as well head to the chain's other location. I still wanted Mexican food and my options were limited.

How bad could it be, I thought. I'm sure that the only reason I don't go there is because the parking is lousy.

Wrong, though I was right in thinking that the parking would be bad.

We walked into the restaurant and my dining companions and I settled in to a booth. The restaurant was busy and noisy, with a group of eight celebrating a birthday to one side of us, a family with several children two tables away and various other small groups nearly filling the dining room. We ordered drinks and read through the menu.

After weighing my options and noting that they sounded quite unlike what I expected, more tex-mex than the other location, I opted to go for something safe-sounding, not wanting to take any chances with mystery meats, and ordered a vegetarian burrito before digging into the chips and salsa on the table. The salsa was good and spicy, but I had a hard time enjoying it once I needed a refill on my drink.

When the food came out, I noticed something odd about my dish. "What's that? There – on the side of the plate," I asked my friends.

We all leaned in for a closer look. It was the sized of a quarter, sauce-covered and didn't look like it was supposed to be there. If I had to guess, I would say that someone in the kitchen had spilled a spoonful of something while plating.

I poked it with my knife, "I think it's a piece of beef."

I called the waiter – a stout, 35-ish man with a thick accent - over and pointed out to him that my vegetarian burrito had beef on the plate. I asked for a new plate, one without meat and meat sauce dribbled over it.

"It's not supposed to be there," he told me.

I stared at him, thinking that he had somehow misunderstood me. "I know it's not supposed to be there. I ordered the vegetarian burrito."

"It's OK. There's no meat in the burrito. It's not supposed to be there." He started to walk away.

"Look," I said, mildly annoyed, "I don't want this. I don't want a plate that has random pieces of meat that aren't supposed to be there sitting on it. It doesn't make it better just because 'it's not supposed to be there.'"

"Fine," he muttered, hinting at sarcasm and reaching for the plate. "We make it how you like it."

To make an unpleasantly long story short, it took a long time for my burrito to come back out and, while there was no beef on the plate, there was also nothing inside the burrito. Actually, there was spinach, but not much of it and no sign of any of the other vegetables that were mentioned on the menu. The whole thing was drowning in sauce. No longer trusting the "main course", I ate the refried beans, which were in a separate dish, and reflected that I should have just eaten them initially. I didn't see the waiter again until he dropped off the check about 20 minutes later.

Aside from the extremely unsatisfying food for myself and my dining companions, neither of whom were impressed with their dishes, I couldn't believe that the waiter had tried to "logic" me into accepting a vegetarian burrito with beef on the plate, telling me that because it wasn't supposed to be there the dish was fine. So – using his logic – if there was a fly in my drink, the drink would be fine because the fly wasn't supposed to be there!

Ordinarily, if I was at a restaurant that I didn't really want to eat at in the first place and I didn't have a great meal, I would wonder whether I was unfairly judging it based on my own pre-existing biases. In this case, I don't think that I was being unfair to ask for a new burrito. Nor do I think that my preference – clearly unreasonable to the waiter – for a beef-less vegetarian entrée, as listed on the menu, was an outrageous one.

It's just an example of bad service, but because there was no apology and no effort to correct the mistake until I practically demanded it, not to mention that the order was wrong when it finally came through, I'm soured on the restaurant. I know that it's just a chain, but I'm still disappointed that, after the closure of a restaurant I really enjoyed, I'm not going to find a replacement easily.

Of course, I'm sure that the task will be a lot easier if I take my waiter's advice and just overlook everything that's "not supposed to be there." Come to think of it, wouldn't that make restaurant health inspectors' jobs much easier, too?