Mexi's — Restaurant in Quispamsis

My husband put it best when we got home and asked for something else to eat to get that 'taste out of my mouth'.

It almost couldn't have been worse...until the owner decided the best solution would be a combative, self-gratifying response instead of looking inward and considering why someone might feel compelled to leave their business a 1 star review, but, at least it was consistent with the rest of our experience.

This is just another tacky, minimal effort for maximum profit SJ restaurant that is not good. It was dead empty when we arrived at dinnertime. The food seems prepackaged and heated and all tastes of salt, old grease or sugar (thanks Sisco for making every low/mid-tier restaurant's food indentical with mass-produced, bland as hospital food, profit-over-quality product. You are truly the Shein of food distribution). Shame on restaurants for taking the easy way out rather than making their stuff in house with quality ingredients. If you are opening packages and heating food you are a lunch counter, not a restaurant. I'm not saying that's the case here but it sure looked and tasted that way.

The portions are small and the prices are very high. Large nachos for almost $30 before tax, meant to share, and you could literally count the chips on the plate. I'd mention the toppings but they were mostly dry and sad looking. The other dishes were similarly unappealing with small portions - heavy on the rice, very light on the meat. All the dishes were in the $25+ range. $25 for one burritto is eye-poppingly expensive unless it's huge, gourmet or memorably good. This was small (our son ate two mains), bland and memorably bad.

All four dishes were, lukewarm, flavourless plates with almost laughably poor presentation (how much raw, unseasoned cabbage can one plate have?).

No salsa or sauces on the table to flavour these bland 'Mexican' dishes and none offered. The one thing a Mexican restaurant should have is a good selection of salsas, limes, peppers. None of that.

Zero atmosophere with a low effort 'latin' Spotify list with that tired, overdone, psuedo-edgy, day of the dead and mall graffitti and sports bar tv screens. If your idea of Mexico is a mix of the worst that Cancun has to offer mixed with dark, dreary, bad Canadian strip-mall sports bar, you might like it. In fact, the only thing that reminded us of Mexico were the take-the-piss, tourist rip off prices.

Add a waitress in her yoga gear who doesn't know the menu and will get your order wrong but re-fill your water every 30 seconds while pushing drinks because she expects a tip for doing nothing and that was our Mexis experience.

There is nothing even remotely Mexican about this place.

Servers in yoga pants is not appropriate for serving food. It's low class, too revealing and akin to showing up for work in your pyjamas.

Worse than our already low expectations from reading other reviews. We wanted it to be good. It wasn't.

There is a bad trend of lazy restaurants around SJ that offer the minimum and expect people to pay premium. It's time to start speaking with our wallets. $20 pre-mix Margaritas? Really? $25 Nachos not big enough to share? $23+ burgers? And a tax and 20% tip expected? It's become ridiculous. Maybe it's why this, and many other low/mid-tier places are empty. Restaurants of this caliber, serving ordinary, ready-to-serve food should not be costing a $120-$150 for a simple night out for four.

Cue the smug and condescending response from an owner who seems more concerned with being argumentative than actually addressing an honest review of their business. Don't take my word for it, scroll through the seemingly endless, unanswered...

The atmosphere was alright. But we had a broken table that we had to swap out ourselves for a non broken one.

Service was friendly, but not very fast.

I found the food good but not spectacular. If you are looking for the old Mexi's that used to be in uptown Saint John for years and years before closing ....this is not it.

For the price I was disappointed. I used to always order Grande with Beef Nachos at Mexi's and they were NEVER a disappointment and came out sizzling on a hot pan and were loaded with toppings, sauces & cheese. Now it arrives on a dinner plate....how boring and inauthentic. The new menu does not have my old favorite. I opted for the beef nachos or else they changed the name. There was almost enough beef, a tiny drizzle of red sauce (you could see where it just stained the chips), hardly any pico de Gallo and so little cheese, I never even noticed it was there!! I basically had nacho chips with taco beef and a sprinkling of other things. For the price, these should be loaded and have CHEESE on them. When you pick up nachos, there should be sauce dripping and cheese stringing. They were rather plain and unexciting.

As much as Mexi's was a regular of our frequented restaurants years ago, I unfortunately do not see this one surviving long. It is as if they took the amazing food they always made and to save money, they removed the excess toppings that would have sky rocketed my rating to 6 stars if I could! But if they continue to serve unextrordinary food and are cheap with ingredients, the folks in this region will abandon it and it will be yet another failed restaurant attempt in the KV area. Saint John is VERY close with hundreds of restaurants. If Mexi's in KV does not quickly fix it's lack of extraordinary food & obvious cheapness in quantity of ingredients which impacts the meal quality), everyone will head the 10 minutes to Saint John to spend their money where they are really getting what they want and getting what they pay for.

Overall....average at best. Flavors are good. Cheap with nacho toppings, seem to not have heard of cheese, slow but friendly service. Food tastes "ok" but nothing that makes me want to go back anytime soon, unfortunately.

Also....a HUGE booboo they made was they brought us chips and salsa before our meal. It is not the same amazing salsa and chips that used to be served. Not even close. Plus the salsa was really really cold as if they took it out of the fridge and gave it to us like that. It was really gross because salsa should be room temp.

I also HATE when you ask to have the rest of your meal packaged to take home....and they just dump cardboard bowls with plastic lids off at the table for you to do it yourself! That is embarrassing sitting in a restaurant surrounded by other patrons and my waitress cannot have the common courtesy to package my left overs for me...isn't that part of the service that we give a tip for??

I really really wanted...

Update 8/7/2025: decided to go in and try the new menu two months ago…we’ve been back three times since. The staff are great. The menu is pretty yummy. The first time back in, our guacamole was frozen in the in the middle (like they possibly use frozen avocados…that’s what I do at home), but the flavors and everything else was yummy. Lots of flavour. The margaritas no longer taste like they are made with premix that is full of sugar with no liquor. The staff are friendly and our kids love the kid menu. Lots of veggie options, lots of variety but still on theme and not too overly priced. Desserts are delicious.

Previous review from well over a year or two ago: We have been here for over a decade and never been into Mexis. We were excited for some yummy Mexican food for Cinco De Mayo. We are a family of mostly vegetarian, but with Mexican, as long as the flavor is there beans and gaucamole can go a long way. The staff when we entered (and through out the whole adventure) we’re friendly and seemed to like their jobs. The atmosphere was inviting. The art on the wall is so fun. The menu was very accomadating for vegetarians. That excited us. We ordered a double margarita each. I ordered the loaded fries with veggie chili instead of meat. My partner ordered the veggie chili. For an app we got the fried avocado. They were delicious. The margaritas were premix…I couldn’t taste triple sec or tequila and it was too sweet. The loaded fries comes with queso sauce, but I didn’t see or taste any on mine (even questioned the waitress) and the meal seemed a little bland. My partners vegetarian chili tasted like tomato paste with no flavor really. Made us kind of sad. So much potential…just some herbs and spices could fix it. The shining light for us was dessert and it didn’t disappoint. Fried ice cream and churros...