My wife and I had a coupon to the Fish Market & Grille "on the Lake" in Mission Viejo (27732 Vista Del Lago, Mission Viejo, CA.92692 - http://www.fishmarketandgrill.com/ ). Live music Friday and Saturday night, nice view, what's not to like, eh?

FYI - we found out when we got to the restaurant that the website's menu needs to be updated.

Anyway, the coupon we had was for buy one entree, get 50% off another entree. Nice deal, eh? The coupon's expiration date was March 24th.

So we went this past Saturday for a date (you can't take your spouse for granted, after all). Not a planned coincidence, but this past Saturday also happened to be St. Patrick's Day.

We called and the person who answered said there would be at most a 10 minute wait.

So we drove over and walked in and stood by the empty maitre'd's podium. And waited ten minutes for someone to even walk up. At least the live music was nice.

Someone eventually did come up and they seated us immediately. The wait and service staff were very nice - even the Latino gentleman who gave us our waters asked us how we were doing and politely and patiently responded to the answer.

The wine selection was very thorough, though I wish they offered half bottles.

My wife had the hazelnut-encrusted mahi mahi, I had the sand dabs. The Caribbean rice side was nice, the coleslaw was good (i.e. very light use of mayonnaise).

However, the mahi mahi and the sand dabs were both either sauteed too long, or with too much butter, or something, because they were heavily oily, and it caused much indigestion for both of us. We've had a similar nut-encrusted mahi mahi dish both at the Charthouse in Cardiff-by-the-Sea and at the Marine Room on La Jolla Shores - we've even made it ourselves. This was just fried too long or the oil/butter/whatever wasn't the right temperature or something.

Now for the coup d'grace and the reason why I'm writing this review. We tried to use the coupon. We ordered only those two dishes, and they were from the REGULAR menu. We didn't order anything off of the special list of 3 dishes for St. Paddy's Day.

The waitress refused to accept the coupon because it was a holiday.

The coupon has no reference to prohibition for use on holidays. The only reference to any forbidden condition was that it "could not be combined with any other offers".

So be careful folks:

1) Don't order anything that would be sauteed or fried, unless you like your fish to be cooked poorly

2) Ask when you walk in the door (or even call beforehand) if coupons are permitted to be used that day.

Never-the-less, I'm peeved and don't plan on going back any time soon.