I am totally spending way too much time in Jersey City these days. I blame it squarely on my job but I guess it could be worse. After a super long day working on MLK Day and doing Escape the Room with a bunch of screaming teenagers, all the 8 of us from my team wanted to do was to grab a seat at a bar, down a couple of beers and maybe a burger.
The Bistro is literally right off the PATH train and it's some weird combination of 5 restaurants all joined together. Since it was right there, it was honestly the path of least resistance (no pun intended). The Bistro is the center piece of these 5 restaurants and it's as you would imagine with the name "The Bistro" a very standard cafe. On their website, they call it casual and classy. I'll give them casual, not so sure about classy not that it's skanky or anything like that but it's not fancy by any stretch of the imagination. The menu is extremely safe - fried calamari, mozzarella sticks, mac and cheese, burgers, pastas and pizzas. It's nothing exciting but sometimes when you're tired and just need a bite to eat, this kind of food will suffice.
They have a happy hour deal where you can get 1/2 off appetizers (limit 1 per person) so since we had 8 people, we got pretty much one of every appetizer and I went with a standard 1/2 roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and green beans. I won't go into all the appetizers but they were your garden variety bar apps - there wasn't one that really stood out but we were so hungry that it honestly wouldn't have mattered. My chicken was a pretty large portion (it seemed much bigger than 1/2 a chicken) and it was a super homey dish with the mashed potatoes. They left off the green beans which was kind of annoying because I was trying to have some veggies with my meal but I was too tired to bring it up with the waitress. I was super full when I left and had no real complaints about my meal in general.
Overall, my experience here kind of re-enforced my continue impression that JC still isn't there when it comes to being a culinary destination. One small note was that the service was super slow but I felt bad for our waitress because she seemed to be the only one in the whole restaurant so I'll give her a pass. One other note, don't get their cocktails, I'd stick to basic wine or beer. I got an Old Fashion because it was on their specialty list and it was overly sweet and not very good. This place was fine in a pinch but I was ready to get the hell out of JC as soon as we got the bill. Total bill: $400 for 8 people with tax, tip and drinks
Photo Credit: Yelp
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