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| - Yelpers, you seem to have this one right on the money. Three stars is a pretty accurate rating for this middling restaurant.
We came here with some friends the other night. In general, I'm not a huge fan of chain restaurants, but I try to keep an open mind. Chain or not, if a restaurant has good food and service, I'm game.
Unfortunately, BJ's Brewhouse doesn't excel in either food or service. On the Saturday night we were there, it was quite busy, and apparently is usually that way. With so many good restaurants in Pittsburgh, I can't quite understand why, but some mysteries of the universe don't have a good answer. We grabbed drinks and an appetizer at the bar while we waited for our table. Our appetizer, the chips with sriracha queso dip, arrived quickly, but it was lukewarm. Lukewarm food is always a punishable crime, but it gets elevated from misdemeanor to felony any time cheese is involved. Because it wasn't hot enough, the queso was thick and semi-coagulated...quite unappealing. Also, despite its name, there was no sriracha flavor in the queso at all (which was so disappointing, as I love me some sriracha).
Once we were seated, it took awhile for our server to refresh our bar drinks and take our order. And unfortunately, it was this way throughout most of our meal...our server was largely absent, and we had to repeatedly flag him down when we needed something. As for our food, we all ordered different things, with mixed results. One friend ordered fried artichokes, tomato soup, and a mozzarella and tomato salad. She reported that the soup and salad were good....fairly standard (as she pointed out, it's pretty hard to mess up tomato soup and mozzarella salad). The fried artichokes, however, were disappointing in that they didn't have any discernible artichoke in them....she said they pretty much just tasted like fried breading. Another friend got the spinach-stuffed mushrooms and thought they were tasty. My husband got the California Chicken Club, which came with a mountain of fries. He thought the sandwich was way too greasy. The bread was very heavily buttered, which made this light-sounding sandwich much heavier than it needed to be. I tried a few of his fries and they were decent....very thin cut and crispy. As for me, I opted for boneless wings with Peppered BBQ sauce. The portion of wings was HUGE....I clearly failed to notice the menu description stated that it was a pound of wings. Uh, whoops. A pound of fried anything for dinner is never well-advised. So needless to say, a doggie bag was needed. The wings themselves were crispy and meaty (thumbs up), but unfortunately there was barely any sauce on them (thumbs down). I wanted to ask for more sauce, but couldn't find our server. So most of the wings I ate were dry and largely devoid of flavor. Total bummer!
As for drinks and dessert....my one friend ordered a watermelon basil margarita and found it to be sweet to the point of being undrinkable. To our server's credit, once we flagged him down and told him that she wanted a beer instead, he took the drink back and didn't charge her for it, so that was good. My husband ordered a couple of their porters and thought they were okay, but was expecting more from a place that brews its own beer. For dessert, we of course had to try their famous pizookie, which is a freshly-baked cookie with ice cream on top. We shared the pizzokie trio so we could try several flavors (we chose salted caramel, cookies and cream, and peanut butter). My friends went nuts over the pizookies and thought they were insanely delicious. Personally, while I thought they were good (I mean, you almost have to actively *try* to make anything with cookies and ice cream taste bad, right?), I thought in general they were a bit too sweet and the individual flavors of each pizookie were drowned out in the overload of sugar. So all three mostly ended up just tasting like generic cookie with generic ice cream to me. Also, the edges of the cookies were overcooked to the point where it created a very unpleasant tough texture in those spots. I dunno...I guess I fancy myself a bit of a dessert snob, so when something is hyped up to the extent the famous pizookie is, I expect it to deliver. This was just so-so for me (but again, my friends loved it, so different strokes).
The above rambling dissertation essentially boils down to the fact that BJ's is quite average across the board. While it's not terrible, it's not a place that I will seek out, and it's certainly not worth waiting for on a busy Saturday night. Go elsewhere, my hungry friends.
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