Critic's Review
Now Closed. If you can't survive in season at the beach, you're really bad.
*************
Another restaurant with no website or online menu opens in Fort Lauderdale.
BBQ at the beach. At least it's unique. One reason is that it's not easy to get approvals for a BBQ restaurant in a residential area. These guys figured out how to convert a deli to a bar and BBQ restaurant without moving a single pipe or outlet. Magicians. I wonder if they know about the lien on the building and the unpaid fines outstanding for code compliance? How can you rent out a building with outstanding code compliance cases?
Nothing new in Fort Lauderdale. Food is food.
I never even bothered to check out the "Spazio Express"; it was a sure-thing failure. The only saving grace of Spazio is the view of the beach; it's not like you go there for the food.
There are a couple of spots on Almond Ave but they have pay meters now so it will cost you at least $1 just to do takeout; I parked on S. Birth where they still have meters so you can get 20 minites for a quarter.
Their sandwich board also doesn't have prices; there's no foot traffic on Almond so I'm not sure who they're trying to lure in with it. BBQs all have the same products, so telling me you have brisket isn't going to tell me anything I don't already know.
It's not even clear where the entrance is; you can go in through the rear patio or there's an entrance from the alley. The place isn't set up as a restaurant in any way; No hostess. No servers. I asked for a menu; I was hoping to get a take-out menu so I could put something up; but they don't have anything like that. No lunch menu. $16 for brisket; with a 90% failure rate I wasn't going to try it for that price. I was hoping to try a couple of items but prices are too high and I wasn't going to drop $30. When in doubt, go for the spare ribs.
The "chef" took my order. BBQ is always pre-made so it's usually pretty quick. I took a seat at a table.
8 people in the place at 2:30pm. Just a spattering of beach girls found their way down the alley; the kind of girls with pink backpacks who giggle a lot. Usually you see these girls in Blondies; maybe these chicks were non-smokers?
They have TVs throughout the restaurant with 1 big one behind the bar. They're trying to sell themselves as a sport bar but with Bo's Beachhouse opening soon they'd better enjoy the next few weeks.
Country music fills the air. Appropriate, but it's not going to draw many people in from the beach. 10 minutes and the food came out.
One of the big issues with this place (and the beach in general). is that so much of the bowels of the city remain here. The view from the back patio isn't something that couples staying at the Ritz Carlton are going to be happy with.
I live 2 miles up the road, so it only took me 12 minutes to get home and open up the food. On first glance, it looked like pretty standard BBQ food.
The side containers are good for mac and cheese but not so good for liquids. Luckily the one with the beans didn't pop open.
Bread crumbs on the mac and cheese, which to me is totally unnecessary. 3 sauces; 2 really because the mustard stuff goes straight into the garbage can. I tried a rib; bark is good but not when it's 1/8" thick. These were so overdone that the bones were all broken. These had been cooked and reheated way beyond their life span.
Mac and cheese was also old and cold; I could have reheated them but I didn't. The beans were runny for BBQ beans; no smoke flavor but not overly sweet with big chunks of pork and bacon; which was surprising because the beans didn't have a lot of taste.
"Texas Toast" is really just garlic bread; cold and soggy. Between the thick crust, the disintgrated bones and the dry overdone meat, the ribs were inedible. BBQ is complicated and there's more than 1 way to ruin ribs; these were ruined in multiple ways.
A waste is $15. I barely got a snack out of all of this.
Conclusion
The truth about this place is that it's really a bar; the only reason they're masquarading as a restaurant is to get the cheap liquor license. It's one of the big problems in Florida; where you're rewarded for paying rent on a 150 seat restaurant by not having to buy a liquor license on the Black Market.
This place isn't set up as a restaurant and it's clear the people who own it don't know how to run one. There are tricks to keeping BBQ fresh for serving over many hours, and this place doesn't know any of the tricks. I'm sure the chef makes mean ribs at home but what was served to me should have been thrown in the garbage a day and a half ago.
No website. No online menu. No take out menus. No chance. Another clown act of a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale.
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getUser() on null in /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php:267 Stack trace: #0 /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php(75): threadedComments->formatComment(Object(stdClass)) #1 /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php(77): threadedComments->printParent(Array, 1) #2 /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php(100): threadedComments->printParent(Array) #3 /usr/local/www/insideftl/comments.php(74): threadedComments->printComments(Array) #4 /usr/local/www/insideftl/single-post.php(208): require_once('/usr/local/www/...') #5 /usr/local/www/insideftl/post.php(22): include('/usr/local/www/...') #6 /usr/local/www/insideftl/index.php(172): include('/usr/local/www/...') #7 {main} thrown in /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php on line 267