Review by
Terri Peters
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- My family of five recently visited BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse together for the first time.
- Our $120 meal included drinks, an appetizer, entrées, and dessert (yes, the famous Pizookies).
- Some members of our party loved the meal, while others are still on the fence about coming back.
I've avoided chain restaurants for years, but I've become more familiar with them since my teenagers started requesting to visit spots like Chili's and Applebee's.
My 17-year-old son and his girlfriend often hit their favorite ones on date nights, and have long been singing their praises for BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse — a chain my husband and I had yet to visit.
I wasn't super familiar with BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse, even though it's been around for years. The first one opened in 1978, and the chain began brewing its own beers in the '90s.
Today, there are dozens of BJ's restaurants around the US, and one is just a few minutes from my home in Central Florida. Since my son and his girlfriend go there often, my husband and I decided it was time to check out the chain with them and our teenage daughter.
Here's what our meal was like.
We were seated right away.
We visited our local BJ's on a Tuesday night around 6:30 p.m. for dinner, and were happy to find it wasn't very crowded at all.
We were seated immediately, and our server arrived at our table to go over the menu before we knew it.
BJ's is known for its signature dessert, the Pizookie, and has a special meal deal that includes it.
Fans of BJ's love the chain's Pizookie desserts, which are cookies baked in a skillet, served warm and topped with ice cream.
My son and his girlfriend are no exception: Sometimes, they'll visit BJ's on a date night just to share a Pizookie.
When there's a seasonal Pizookie, like the recent Spooky Pizookie topped with orange Halloween-themed ice cream, they're quick to head to the restaurant to try it.
During our visit, BJ's had a special Monday through Friday menu with meal deals that include a Pizookie dessert. The $13 Pizookie Meal Deal comes with an entrée, such as fried chicken or a deep-dish pizza, as well as a personal-sized Pizookie topped with a scoop of ice cream.
There's even an option to add an appetizer or upgrade to a full-sized Pizookie for an additional $4.
We started our meal with drinks, and my husband took advantage of one of the weekly specials.
BJ's has been brewing its own beers since 1996, and the menu features a wide selection of ales, ciders, stouts, and more.
However, we started our meal with a round of sodas for the teens and me, and a few glasses of wine for my husband.
Priced at around $4 to $4.50 each, our sodas included free refills.
On Tuesday, when we visited, glasses of wine were half off, making my husband's cabernet only $5.50 per glass.
BJ's has other daily specials that offer additional savings, too, like half-off pizzas on Mondays and $13 loaded burgers on Wednesdays.
My husband ordered boneless wings and had no complaints.
For his meal, my husband got the boneless wings — a full pound of battered, white-meat chicken bites that cost $16.
Served with celery and a blue-cheese dipping sauce, the appetizer worked great as a full meal for him, leaving him satisfied with the portion size.
BJ's offers a variety of options for wing sauces, ranging from honey barbecue to Nashville hot. My husband chose the sweet and spicy Asian glaze for his wings and found it to be flavorful and enjoyable.
He said these wings were great, and that he could see coming back to sit at the bar with friends to enjoy a few orders of them with some of BJ's specialty beers.
The salad I had was so good that I plan on recreating it at home.
I ordered the $13 Pizookie meal deal and chose the Enlightened Strawberry Fields Salad as my entrée.
The salad was really, really good, filled with candied pecans, blue-cheese crumbles, and strawberries tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette that I truly enjoyed. I also loved that it included grilled chicken for added protein.
The salad was so tasty, in fact, that I started making mental notes for how I could recreate it at home.
Between the fresh fruits and greens and the flavorful nuts and cheese, the dish was one of the best salads I've gotten at a restaurant. I'd definitely return to BJ's just to order it again.
My daughter didn't love her chicken entrée, but our server was very understanding.
My daughter also ordered the $13 Pizookie meal, choosing chicken Parmesan as her entrée. She wasn't a fan of the dish once it arrived at our table, complaining that the sauce was a little too sweet and the chicken tasted "off."
My husband and I both tried the dish and agreed with her that the sauce tasted pretty sugary for a marinara, and the chicken seemed a bit dry.
We didn't plan on mentioning the issue to our server, but he noticed my daughter wasn't eating when checking on our table and asked if everything was OK.
We explained that the dish wasn't what we expected, and he was incredibly kind and understanding, offering to bring a new dish (my daughter declined) and ultimately giving us a 10% discount on the entire check to make up for it.
It was lovely of him to have gone above and beyond the way he did, and it was certainly not something we expected.
However, my son loved his cheeseburger and fries.
My son, a picky eater, gets a plain cheeseburger and fries almost every time we go to a restaurant.
Our visit to BJ's was no exception, and he ordered the $15 classic cheeseburger, his go-to comfort meal. His verdict? BJ's cheeseburgers are really good — among his favorite burgers at a chain restaurant.
As a mom who wants her kids to be as happy as possible, I loved seeing our server try so hard to help my daughter when her order wasn't what she expected, and knowing my son enjoyed his simple cheeseburger meal.
Dinners out with teens can get expensive, so it's always nice to know they'll enjoy their food, or if they do not, the restaurant will try to make things right.
The personal pizza my son's girlfriend ordered looked delicious.
My son's girlfriend also took advantage of the Pizookie special, ordering the pizza-and-salad combo for $13.
Her Caesar salad looked great, made with green romaine and yummy-looking cheese, dressing, and croutons. She was able to choose any variety of personal pizza she wanted, and went with a barbecue-chicken one that looked amazing.
BJ's pizzas are also available in a gluten-free variety. Had I known sooner, I probably would've ordered one for my meal as well, especially given delicious-sounding flavor combinations, like chicken, bacon, and ranch, or pies with five different meats.
My teens were right — the Pizookies were pretty amazing.
Me, my son's girlfriend, and my daughter got to choose our very own Pizookie variety as part of our meal deal.
I ordered the gluten-free chocolate-chip version that I'd upgraded to a full size for an extra $4. My son's girlfriend chose a regular chocolate-chip cookie, and my daughter picked a strawberry-shortcake cookie — all topped with vanilla ice cream.
I was skeptical that BJ's Pizookie desserts would live up to the hype, especially since I've had plenty of warm cookies topped with ice cream before.
However, after trying the Pizookie, I'm definitely a believer. The warm, gooey cookie was amazingly good with the perfect amount of melt-in-your-mouth, buttery, chocolaty goodness in every bite.
Paired with sweet, creamy vanilla ice cream, the dessert was so great that, between bites, I said to my husband, "OK, I can see coming here on a date night just to split one of these."
Our $121 meal felt like a decent value, but my teenage daughter wasn't sold, and my husband and I are on the fence.
Ultimately, we spent just over $120 for drinks, an appetizer, entrées, and desserts for a group of five. It would've been around $132 without the 10% discount the server gave us due to my daughter's issues with her entrée.
At around $25 per person, the meal felt like a pretty good value, especially given the variety of food we received for the price.
My son and his girlfriend, who were already big fans of the chain, would absolutely return to BJ's for more pizza, burgers, and Pizookies.
My husband and I, however, are undecided. We may return for a quick snack at the bar or to share a Pizookie dessert, but I'm not sure we'd take the entire family there again for dinner, especially given my daughter's disappointment with the experience.
There are other chains we've all enjoyed, plus we usually prefer to support smaller mom-and-pop restaurants when we dine out.
Still, that Pizookie was really delicious, and I've definitely caught myself daydreaming about going back for one since.
BJ's Restaurant and Brew House did not respond to a request for comment.
