Local Favorites: Cafe Rio vs. Costa Vida

Here in Utah, they know how to make burritos.  Really good burritos.  But the question everyone is asking is "do you prefer Cafe Rio or Costa Vida?".

Some background for starters: Cafe Rio started around 1997 in southern Utah serving burrito, tacos, enchiladas and salads with homemade tortillas cooked on an open griddle. The best part is that they put your food through an oven which heats it up and gets the cheese melted.  They had one in Provo before I graduated in 2000, and it was a big treat to go there since I was a poor college student.

For those in Iowa, all they have is Chipotle and locally owned Pancheros, etc, which both make a burrito the same way, with luke-warm meat, cold beans, rice and toppings, and heat their homemade tortillas on an industrial hot press thing. In the end you get a cold burrito. Period. Which is why I love Cafe Rio's style here.

Costa Vida started in 2003 with a carbon-copy menu, store layout, kitchen layout, etc. So close, in fact, that "In 2005, Costa Vida rival Cafe Rio filed a lawsuit in Salt Lake City over recipes. The Provo-based Cafe Rio, founded six years before its competitor, alleged in a 3rd District suit that Costa Vida franchises had wrongfully copied and used its "trade secrets, menu, layout, food presentation, procedures and processes."  Source

Costa Vida denied the allegations and added the chain was "completely surprised by this complaint and it's timing. We have been operating for nearly two years and have heard nothing of these allegations since we opened."

Costa Vida was also concerned that after 2 years of being open, there was no allegations until 2005 when Cafe Rio was purchased by Apex Partners, who had much deeper pockets for things like law suits.

The law suit was settled in 2007, with no apparent change to the Costa Vida operations or menu, and the court docs state that the terms of the settlement are not disclosed.  IE: Payout.  Both have since moved on and have opened dozens of local locations, and more out of state. They both have great food, don't get me wrong, but it took a while for me to understand that it is a "legal" situation that both restaurants have the same menu and same layout. Here is another blog post that has photos of how identical their food is, both salads and burritos.

Decision time: For me, it comes down to the subtle differences, but I have to put my $$ with Cafe Rio. 3 reasons:

1. Cafe Rio has free quesadillas for the little ones. Our son gets a free one, and picks at the rest of our food. Costa Vida charges $3.99 for a kids quesadilla. This is the major reason why we go.
    
2. Cafe Rio is my original experience with this type of food, and it is nostalgic to eat there, reminding me of my college days, and how cool we thought we were to go out to eat on the weekends.  Otherwise we were eating some pretty cheap food the rest of the week. Trust me, a quick dinner at my apartment of a hot dog with cheese in a tortilla is still a vague memory from college that I am trying to erase from memory still.
3. We had Costa Vida when we first got here 2 months ago, and there was a cotton string from a cleaning rag in the quesadilla tortilla that we were eating. Not totally nasty, but still. We pulled it out, showed them, and they got us a replacement quesadilla. If we were at Cafe Rio, even if they had a string in the tortilla, it would have been free. 

So, that being said, which do you prefer?