A Quick Trip to BJ's

BJ's Restaurant and Brewery

24032 El Toro Road

Laguna Hills, CA 92651

My buddy Clay made a surprise visit down to our area, so Katie and I decided we would take him to BJ's. He is usually pretty picky when it come to eating places, and I had remembered him eating here before, so I knew he would be down to head over to BJ's Laguna Hills location.

BJ's has 97 locations throughout the United States. They started in Santa Ana, and wowed people with their deep dish Chicago pizza. In 1997, they started making their own beer in their Brea store. I like BJ's, but I never really think about going there. It  is always crowded every time I go, and this trip was no exception. We got there at 7:30 on a Wednesday, and still had to wait for ten minutes. This is the food we got once we were seated.

To start our meal, we got the Crisp Potato Skins Platter. These potato skins are filled with jack and cheddar cheese, bacon and green onions. Served with an awesome sour cream dip. This is probably one of my top 10 appetizers. I know they are simple, but they are always good. They are not too oily, and always crisp. Usually I am more of a Ranch dressing guy, but these call for sour cream.

Clay got the Sweet Pig Pizza. This personal pizza included ham, pineapple and seasoned tomatoes. Clay liked this pizza, but took the tomatoes off of this. He felt the pizza was just average. They did not really load up on the toppings on this one.

Here is Katie's Spinach and Artichoke Pizza. This of course had those two items, as well as cream cheese, mozzarella, parmesan, and tomatoes. I am not going to lie to you, this is definitely not my type of pizza, and I did not try it. I will defer to her opinion on this pizza. She said that there was too much white sauce on this. She likes their veggie pizzas better.

I have really been craving a good Cuban sandwich lately, and when I saw that BJ's had a Cuban Burger, that is what I summoned. This half pound burger came with ham, swiss cheese, pickles, dijonnaise, and mustard. It had the ingredients of a Cuban sandwich, but did not quench my desire for one. The burger was good, but a little bland tasting. The fries were good with ranch.

For dessert we got the Pizookie Trio. Three mini pizookie's, we chose a Triple Chocolate cookie, Peanut Butter cookie and a Chocolate Chunk cookie, all topped with a scoop of ice cream. The peanut butter was our favorite and the chocolate chunk was close behind. The triple chocolate was just too much for me. For the indecisive, this was the dessert to get.

To be honest this blog entry was very hard to write. I was not inspired by the food on this trip to BJ's. Nothing was really too bad, but nothing really knocked my socks off either. It's funny, I remember liking BJ's a lot more before I started this blog, and before I started going out a lot more. It could have been my choices on this night, or maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it. I will go back in the future, but for now there are way too many places on my list to try.

Out of five raindrops, (from the famous BJ Thomas song), five being best to zero being worst, BJ's receives 2.5 raindrops.

For more information on BJ's, click here: http://www.bjsbrewhouse.com/