Beach Bunnies Visited 2/17/2013 2 Forks

Beach Bunnies 411 S Fort Lauderdale Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, FL 33304

Ok, so I'll be honest, I don't think the name of the place we actually ate at was called Beach Bunnies. But the name of the place on my receipt seems to refer to a place that doesn't exist anymore and the place we did eat at did share the same menu as Beach Bunnies so I'm just going with this name.  But that should have been a bad sign right?

The girls and I were in FL walking around the boardwalk strip area starving and looking for a good brunch place.  Apparently people in Fort Lauderdale don't really do brunch or at least not by the beach.  After walking around aimlessly for a while and slowly getting hungry and cranky, we picked a place that had the most outdoor space in the sun.  When we sat down the waitress gave us two different menus telling us that we can order food from both places.  So all the food was coming out of the same kitchen and honestly the menu was pretty much of the same so it was all confusing.   One of the reason we picked this place was because they had a breakfast menu. The menu also had a variety of salads, sandwiches, burgers, fried seafood baskets, randomly a bunch of gyros, and also ribs.  So it was just a mish-mosh of totally random things.  Some of the girls got excited by the fact that we could order breakfast but sadly the waitress informed us that they were no longer serving breakfast.  I was kind of annoyed by this as they should have put the breakfast hours on the menu or told us when we sat down.  It's kind of bad to set expectations for customers but only to dash their hopes when they try to order.  In the end, I went for a Greek Salad with shrimp ($14) because I had been eating tons of crap on vacation so thought it would be good to go a bit healthy. 

We then proceeded to wait forever for our food.  Good thing we had ordered drinks beforehand.  I should also mention that most of the mixed drinks were pretty awful here.  A few of the girls ordered Bloody Marys and they mentioned that it tasted like Campbell's tomato soup with some vodka.  The drink looked super thin and watery so I wasn't surprised by  it.  The strawberry daiquiri that Jill and I got tasted like a frozen drink with almost no alcohol in it.  The winner of the day was the mimosa mostly because it came with its own mini bottle of champagne.  When we ordered our 2nd round of drinks the waitress mentioned that they ran out of glasses and had to serve our drinks in plastic cups.  WTF?  It was only 2pm on a Saturday, how could they already be out of clean glasses? Another service gripe was that Kristin tried to order an orangia and the waitress was like "what is that?" and Kristin had to point out that it's the orange drink in the refrigerator.  Really? Then when we ordered a 3rd round of mimosas the waitress told us that they ran out of champagne. 

Finally when the food came out, I was actually a bit surprised by how decent my salad was.  April had mentioned that when she went to the bathroom and got a glimpse of the inside of the restaurant that it looked like a run down Subway Sandwich joint (we all agreed after seeing it for ourselves). So we weren't expecting too much food-wise.  Surprisingly,  my salad was pretty fresh and dressed well with a light dressing.  I just disappointed at the size of the shrimp served with the salad.  I was about 1/2 the size I expected here (and no, I wasn't expecting jumbo shrimp here just ones that weren't so shriveled).  The salad came with a side a taziki and pita that I found quite enjoyable and a great supplement to my greens.  The sweet potato waffle fries were ($4) great and I wished more places offered this as a fry option.  Everyone else's food seemed pretty decent, not great, but we were just happy to have had food and lots of drinks in our belly. 

When it came time pay our bill, we all put our credit cards down and the waitress took the check away for a while.  She then came back 15-20 mins later to tell us they didn't take Amex.  It was a bit frustrating that it took her 20 minutes to tell us that.   Finally, after another 15 minutes (and almost 3 hours after we sat down to eat), we were able to pay our bill ($32/pp with tax and tip).  My gripes are more service related but if you go in expecting that the food is your standard beach/bar food then you probably won't be too let down.  I'm not sure if there are really that many other better beach side restaurants, but I would definitely research your options before settling on a place to eat. 

Photo Credit: Yelp