Taquilo's Tex-Mex — Restaurant in Galveston

I ordered the “Fiesta Nachos". They are made using what seems to be a watery commercial nacho cheese sauce like the kind used for nachos in a stadium. I guess I prefer nachos made with real cheese melted on the chips. The ground beef was good and in sufficient quantity. There were barely detectable quantities of the included refried beans and pico de gallo. A few pickled jalapeno slices were on one edge of the plate. A small dolop of sour cream was on top. The included guacamole was entirely missing. The manager removed the dish from the bill.

My companion only ate one of her 3 ground beef tacos and told me later she didn't like them because they were mostly beef and lettuce.

We sat at the bar. It wasn't busy. We had to wait a long time for the bartender to take our order because she was too busy chatting with the customer seated next to me. Our food took a long time to arrive in spite of the place being nearly empty (8:15pm on 3/26/24). We had to wait for our check at the end because the bartender was busy making 5 gallon buckets of house Margaritas.

Speaking of those Margaritas, I'm glad I didn't order one. A sign proclaims that they are the best Margaritas in town. A large banner says they are made with Jose Cuervo silver tequila. I witnessed handles of a cheap well brand tequila being dumped into the buckets, not Jose Cuervo. It's probably a good thing that no limes were harmed in the production of these margaritas. No liquid fruit juice was added. These Margaritas were made using pouches of dry beverage mix powder. The water was added by placing the bucket on the floor in front of the multi-compartment warewashing sink. Water from the sink spigot was then channeled into the bucket using a metal ice scoop. Is this practice allowed? I thought that the use of such sinks for purposes other than dishwashing was prohibited. There is a possibility of contamination of the spigot due to splashing. At any rate, it's not a good look.

While there I discovered from a takeout order bag I saw that this restaurant is part of a small local chain called Galveston Restaurant Group. They also own seven other restaurants in Galveston. I will be leery of trying those other...

Update: decided to give it another try, AND GLAD I DID!!! Completely different experience than my first review.

Staff was AMAZING AND ATTENTIVE. Food was delicious and I’m sold. The manager went around asking everyone about their experience, I did let him know how much my experience changed from the last time I was here. I’m happy to give this place the kuddos it deserves!!!

GREAT WORK!!!

This was my husband and I first time at Taquilos this evening. I was looking forward to purchasing their membership reward program because there are several restaurants that participate in the program that we visit often. (Just as I have a Landry Select membership.) But after experiencing awful service, I decided not to purchase the membership. We arrived at “table 1” around 5:45pm. We sat down and watched several employees running around like crazy, making eye contact with us but never acknowledging us. About 10 mins after we arrived, another couple sat down at “table 2” and were promptly greeted and started ordering drinks… meanwhile we were still sitting there waiting to be acknowledged. The young lady working the bar noticed we hadn’t been taken care of and asked several employees if “table 1” had been taken care of… she was told yes but we hadn’t. We remained patiently sitting and my jaw just about dropped when table 2 was already having their dinner order taken, yet we still hadn’t been acknowledged at all. Finally the employee that helped “table 2” came to take our dinner order but I politely informed him that we hadn’t even placed our drink order. IT WAS A DISASTER!!! When our food came out, my fajitas were not cooked as I ordered them and my husband asked for corn tortilla tacos but he received flour… the only great thing we had was the chips and the ranch/sour cream dip. We were very disappointed. The scenery of downtown Galveston was nice, but other than that, I wish we had a...

We wanted to give a Mexican food place on Galveston island a try, and we stopped here based on the reviews. The salsa roja was good. It's my opinion it would be better had it been served warm. The cilantro cream sauce wasn't bad either, but it was extremely cold. We started with the chicken kisses which were very good, from there we ordered a large guacamole and the stuffed poblano pepper. The guacamole tasted of nothing but lime juice. It was absolutely terrible. It was odd when the manager came by to tell us the guacamole tasted of lime and other flavours, I thought it would have tasted of avocado....maybe we looked like we had never eaten Tex-Mex food before or we didn't know how to make guacamole.

The poblano was pretty good, but it was barely warm. Instead of being a whole pepper, it was half of a pepper with the end cut off. It was stuffed with plenty of chicken, but like I said it was luke-warm. It was supposed to come with some type of Texas chili gravy, that was not on the plate. The rice was good, not exceptional. The charro beans lacked flavour. The drinks (margaritas) were absolutely terrible. Not to mention ridiculously overpriced. The house Margarita is a shot of tequila with sweet-and-sour mix, no flavor. The top shelf was a little better, but not really great or worth the price (tiny). We went to the bar across the street and had a top shelf Margarita that was infinitely better than anything we were served at Taquilos....It was $2 more, 2.5 times bigger, and came with a double shot of top shelf tequila, Gran Marnier, and another liquor.

I would also note that the prices for fajitas are pretty expensive for a large order of beef, $56. Overall, this will be a pass for us...