With the super sad (but exciting for her!) news that SJ is moving this month to San Francisco, we’re all feeling like we need to squish in as much quality Bristol blogger babe time in with her as possible. The invite from TGI Friday’s Cabot Circus to come and check out their new menu items couldn’t have appeared in my inbox at a better time. We met Lily and Lyzi there and had to try some of their cocktails…the barman asked us what sort of thing we liked to drink and then chose something for us. I ended up with a Tokyo Iced Tea – essentially the same as a Long Island Iced Tea, but with Midori instead of gin, and lemonade instead of coke. SO GOOD.
Much nicer photo than any of the others in this post of me and SJ by Paul Groom
TGI’s in Cabot was a bit of a surprise to me when it opened. When I heard the news that it was opening, I was wondering which restaurant was closing, because there didn’t seem to be any space available, but all of a sudden, a beautiful, huge restaurant suddenly appeared in the space that was once a tiny temporary place for the Calendar Shop.
Sipping cocktails, and gossiping more than people who saw each other the night before really needed to, we grabbed a table and pored over the special new menu items – Cabot Circus is one of the few branches that are trying out these new items, and if they’re popular, then everywhere else will get them!
It was difficult to choose, even with just a few items, but TGI’s had thought of that and had plates on display so you could have a look…
The top row are the starters – l-r, hot wings, bruschetta, Jack Daniels pork belly, and Jack Daniels beef chilli nachos. Bottom row, l-r are two of the mains – the deep south grill and the Warrior burger
My starter was pretty easy to choose – I went for the Jack Daniels coated pork belly (of course), and it was delicious. The last time I went to TGI’s was (ashamedly) about 10 years ago when I worked for a Whitbread company and would abuse my discount by requesting ALL the JD sauce for my chicken, so it was nice to see it on the menu still!
Lyzi and Lily went for the hot wings, and SJ went for bruschetta (which was so yum, I had to steal a little bit!)
Our mains came out quickly, and I started to get the Fear. You know, that fear when you’ve ordered something and it’s much bigger than you expected? The Warrior burger is essentially two burgers stacked on top of each other – and I’m not meaning in a Big Mac way, it is literally two burgers with all the toppings staked together. Erk.
I tried to figure out how to eat it. Face first?
Try to hold it all together and shove it in my face?
SJ went for the much more lady like knife and fork way, despite the debate previously about eating burgers with cutlery
Lyzi and Lily both went for the hot dog, which came on top of a bucket of chips. Deceptively small looking!
We battled through the mountains of meat, but couldn’t quite manage it! We had such a fun evening though, thank you TGI’s! We’re already looking at having our next Bristol bloggy meal meetup (meat up?) there!
