howRDUdoin? is a blog about Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Fiesta Grill on Highway 54 west of Chapel Hill is the best Mexican restaurant in North Carolina. Hell, it rivals the best Mexican food I’ve had in Chicago or Los Angeles, so let’s just call it The Best Mexican Restaurant As Far As We’re Concerned.

But this tiny prefab shack next to an abandoned gas station five miles from the nearest traffic signal isn’t exactly a secret, and people come from far and wide to wait over an hour at peak times for a seat. Oh, how we sit outside on the bench and crane our necks and glower at people picking over their bones and splitting the check seven ways and generally keeping us from EATING, which we need to do to survive. Don’t they remember when they were us, only a few minutes ago? What the hell is wrong with people?

Well, awful news: Orange County is making them cut their seating in half, down to thirteen seats total. It’s almost certainly because of utility concerns or some other bureaucratic nonsense, but we’d believe whatever explanation they had. Because it’s a tiny prefab building that looks like it was plopped in the middle of nowhere, and that can’t be good for crowds like that.

They allude to ”exploring other ways in which to serve you better,” which hopefully means they’ll move to a gigantic facility convenient to everyone in the world but still maintain their current quality, and allow us to roll our eyes at the new crowds who didn’t know them before they sold out.