Taco Bill Mexican – Springvale – looks nicer on the website

Taco Bill Springvale is located on the Princes Highway close to the well-known horrific, multi-directional traffic intersection at Princes Highway and Springvale Road. Thankfully if you are coming from the south-east, you can get to the restaurant without having to go through that dangerous, confusing intersection by making a turn at a dividing strip before that part of the road. To look for it, just lookout for the restaurant itself or the Country Cob, the Cambodian Pie and bakery store, on the other side of the road and make sure you slow down to make the turn at the dividing strip.

Taco Bill has its own parking in its rear – though pretty small and very dilapidated with pot holes, unevenness and cracks. It probably has seen better days, but it looks like it hasn’t had a makeover in over 20 years.

The best way to get to the restaurant is by car, but if going by car isn’t an option, you can catch one of the many highway buses. But catching the train is out of the question unless you want to walk 30 minutes to the restaurant and another 30 minutes back to Springvale Station.

The restaurant’s look inside and outside is weary. old and needing a bit of work. Visiting at night time, the restaurant manages to stand slightly out with a few neon signs flashing “Taco Bill” and “Mexican”, but otherwise most of the light sources are contained within the four walls of the white rendered building.

The interior of the restaurant looks fine for a casual dining restaurant with a kind of ranch feel to it. It’s got some character with wooden bar and some more neon signs inside the restaurant. Otherwise it was a pretty run of the mill family style restaurant whose heydays has long past.

One positive is the service. It is decent. We were served corn chips and a salsa on arrival and our child was given a colouring page and some crayons to keep them entertained. So I’d give them some points for being family friendly.

But it’s worth pointing out that the entrance way to the restaurant’s interior is narrow. It was a chore bringing in the pram, trying to through the entrance, because you have to take the narrow path up to the entrance, the entrance width is narrow and you have to keep the swing-open front door ajar for the pram (or wheelchair) while the entranceway itself before the steps is small.

Before arriving, we checked out their menu on their website, plus squizzed at all the photos, and from what we saw it looked alright albeit most of the main meals were sitting around $25 or more. So we decided to give the place a chance, despite some poor Google reviews.

We ordered their Fajita with beef for $28, which the menu stated was their highly recommended dish labelled as “The No. 1 Taco Bill Favourite”, and the Combination dish (with a taco, enchilada, and other stuff) with chicken for $26. For a place like this, it’s our typical approach to pick a few dishes that highlight the restaurant’s best dishes and, for ourselves, to satiate that desire to try new, different things.

The food came out relatively quickly. The Fajita came with a hot plate of onions, capsicum and beef along with a plate of rice, lettuce and guacamole and four flour tortillas, while the Combination came with an enchilada, taco and taquito with rice and beans. When seeing the dishes, it was sad to see that the photos on the website of bright coloured plates turn into messy looking, almost-shades of grey things on a plate. The sizzling plate of beef had little black charred bits. (Of course there were tomatoes, lettuce, and guacomole, but the main items on the plate were not well presented due to charred pieces of onion, beef, etc.)

Despite being “The No. 1 Taco Bill Favourite”. the Fajita was unsatisfying and disappointing. The flour tortillas that came separate to the sizzling plate were good since they came slightly warm, but the rest of the Fajita combo was not good. The sizzling plate had seriously overcooked beef, onions and capsicum with some bits charred to crisps and the spice they used was ungenerous with hints of flavour in some parts and mostly flavourless in other parts. Plus they need to get their hot plates replaced, because there are signs of the plates protection peeling off and it being no longer fit for purpose. Not only that, the rice was bland, the lettuce was just lettuce and the “guacamole” just seemed like a plain cut-up avocado with little care in its preparation.

The Combination plate had a decent enchilada and taco, but everything else was meh as well. The chicken was overcooked and dry in every part of the dish, including the enchilada, and the beans looked old and greatly discoloured from that typical black bean colour you’d expect. It my view it was just bean goop – and wasn’t very appetising.

Unfortunately the food and its presentation was a far cry from what we hoped and thought we’d get with its bland rice and dry meats, and ugly looking plates. Normally I love Mexican food for its interesting flavours of zesty lemon, rich tomatoes, creamy avocado, sweet corn, and sour cream but this just wasn’t it. We were left thinking it would have been better to head into Springvale Central for a decent Vietnamese meal with high quality food for about half the price.

The owners ought to consider having a decent top chef run the kitchen and ensure quality control, and that may require paying better or getting into the kitchens themselves to ensure great meals and repeat customers. (As a former owner of a small, successful family restaurant myself, you want the food to be excellent and the best people to ensure that are the people’s whose livelihoods depend on the place being a success.)

Read more about my top recommended restaurants in Springvale here.

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