Smokey Joe's Ziyou Branch — Restaurant in Kaohsiung

Okay let’s start with what this is and what it isn’t: 🙂It is a large, colourfully decorated family restaurant with menu choices for everyone (Tex-mex, Italian, Chinese, vegetarian etc). 🙂It isn’t an authentic focused Tex-mex or Mexican restaurant.

Set your expectations accordingly and you’ll be happy eating here. As others have said it’s like a big chain American restaurant. And like many places with a lot on the menu the food we ordered was a bit mixed in quality:

Garlic bread - tasted good Burger - really good with a lot of rich smoky flavour from the bacon served with salad and crinkle cut fries. Chicken fajita - very tomato taste, kinda Mexican/italian mix served with four tacos. Seafood Mac and cheese - very good with fresh seafood. Lemon meringue pie - looked cool, had nice texture and taste.

Service was fast and ordering was via a qr code (note that the ordering website has no pictures and wasn’t translatable so if you don’t speak Chinese you might like to do it in person).

Overall if you’re looking to go with the family especially if they all have different tables in food it looking for a fun restaurant I think this is a good option. Just don’t expect anything too authentic.

*Price use we spent 2500NT for the meal above plus a milkshake...

The decor and atmosphere was nice, if a bit noisy. The food was pretty disappointing, especially at their price levels.

The caesar salad was drowning in dressing, probably the worst dish that we ordered. The beef chimichangas were bland and dry, it was basically just strips of beef that you'd find in a stir-fry, cooked with cheese in a flour shell - the only flavor was from the store bought salsa served on the side. The Mexican pizza was good, but more of a flatbread. Their buffalo wings were the sole bright spot in the meal, very juicy and crispy - the buffalo sauce served on the side was a bit sweet, but still very good.

Overall I'd say the food is overpriced for the quality that you get. Other than that, the dining experience...

As a westerner I can tell the food is not authentic. The food tasted as if it was merely microwaved. In addition, the waiter came back multiple times telling us our desserts weren’t available despite her making us choose new unavailable ones four times. The iced americano was also too sweet to even sip at. The spaghetti tasted like watered down tomato and the chicken curry tasted as though it had been bought from PX Mart in advance. The dessert was good though, hence where the two...