Last night a group of us headed into the city to have dinner at Virgil’s BBQ in Times Square. Feeling super touristy, we got the ultimate hit of that when we bought our round-trip NJ Transit tickets. For both my fiancé and I to travel from our train stop in Edison to New York Penn Station, we each paid $24.50. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost 50% more than we paid before the price increase (it was only about $17.50 before!). Needless to say, our trips to the city will be a little less frequent, and probably by car for the foreseeable future.
Despite that little road bump, we definitely enjoyed our dinner. We started off with some hush puppies for the table which were AMAZING. I typically see hush puppies in a ball-like form, but these looked more like mozzarella sticks. They were served with a maple-syrup butter, and I had to use serious restraint not to eat the entire plate. Unfortunately, they were super filling, leaving me little room for my actual meal. As for drinks, they have a lot to offer in terms of beer, wine, margaritas, and mixed drinks. My fiance and I went for their beer flight of Magic Hat (Circus Boy, #9, and Virgil’s), while others got the “June Bug” mixed drink, lemonade, and root beer.
As always, I spent some time prior to our trip familiarizing myself with their menu. It’s weird, I know, but I like to think by previewing the menu beforehand, my decision making is made easier once at the actual restaurant. I decided on the Fish Fry, which was actually their special for the day; it had calamari, scallops, shrimp, monk fish and cod served with homemade waffle chips, cornbread, and two types of creamy tartar sauce. It was really good, but I barely made a dent in it! My fiance went with the two meat combo of Memphis spare ribs and Texas brisket and two sides of macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes. Some of our other table mates had the barbeque chicken, smoked ham, fried chicken po’boy, and the “pig out” which came with a little bit of everything – bbq chicken, Texas link, ribs, brisket, and two sides!
I don’t think there was much conversation during, or even after our meal – everyone loved everything, and they were STUFFED! We had little room or motivation for anything afterwards, so we wound up heading back home, feeling old and lame.
I have to be honest that I was a bit worried prior to the trip. Everyone aside from me had been there before, but I had an inkling that based on it’s location (46th St. right across from the giant Toys R Us in Times Square) that it was going to be gimmicky, and really over priced. Turns out that I was almost completely wrong. Yes, it was somewhat expensive, but we got A TON of food, and it definitely wasn’t gimmicky like I expected. So, I would absolutely go back. But this time, I’d get something that was in one of their 1400lb capacity smoker!