I had Joella's Hot Chicken highly recommended to me. Specifically, I was told to try the restaurant's Pimento Cheese Chicken Sandwich. I stopped in when I was in the area, and was a little surprised that it was a regular fast food restaurant. I had Joella's described as a chain of gourmet hipster chicken restaurants, but that was inaccurate. The building was similar to a Zaxby's.
As for the Pimento Cheese Chicken Sandwich, think a Chick-Fil-A sandwich (fried chicken and pickles) with added pimento cheese. It didn't look great, but the sandwich did have much more flavor than the Chick-Fil-A equivalent. I had macaroni and cheese as a side.
Joella's Hot Chicken was okay. It was a bit over hyped when I had it recommended to me. Good for Joella's for creating that hype though.
When I ate at this restaurant back in 2011, I was under the impression that I was eating at Captain J's Ocean Deck. Apparently Captain J's is the restaurant next door. I have since found out that this blog post is actually about Sandbar Sports Grill. Read on:
Sandbar Sports Grill is a bar in Cocoa Beach located a block away from Ron Jon. I wasn't expecting much when I ordered a pizza from a place like this, but it turned out to be surprisingly good. The crust was thin, bubbly in spots, and almost cracker-like. Cheese and sauce were in good proportion and had good flavor. Definitely not a bad pizza for a beachside bar...
On my last trip down to South Florida, the tentative plan was to going to involve seeing Cirque du Soleil's Kooza. It turned out they had sold out several days in advance when I went to buy our tickets, so I decided to look for some sort of alternate form of entertainment. This ended up being a trip to Santa's Enchanted Forest in Southwest Miami...
Santa's Enchanted Forest turned out to be a huge fair with lots of Christmas themed dioramas. Being that it was a fair, they had all the appropriate deep fried carnival food...
There were also lots of other vendors selling pretty interesting foods. Lots of Latin-American foods and many of these vendors seemed local rather than touring with the carnival. Here's a stand selling steak kabobs cooked on a spinning rack over an open flame.
It was a cold evening, so I got myself a nice warm cup of hot cocoa...
It turned out I got my circus fix too. I suppose it was totally different from the circus experience I would have gotten from Cirque du Soleil, but I'm not complaining...
During the first weekend in November, I found myself at the Space Coast State Fair in Cocoa. If you're reading about a fair here, it means I consumed some fair food while I was there!
I had some freshly cut french fries. There was a scary amount of oil dripping off these...
For something a bit less greasy, I also had an ear of hot roasted corn! I love how they grill these still in the husk.
I also came across a taco truck in a camper called Authenticos Tacos Mexicanos. These fairs generally don't have taco trucks serving stuff like tongue tacos...
I went to see ICE at the Gaylord Palms Hotel in Kissimmee, FL. Pretty cool exhibit where you go into a tent cooled to 9°F and see all sorts of ice carvings and ride down ice slides.
After you leaving the freezing temperatures, everyone got a very small complementary cup of hot cocoa. While at the hotel, I bought a dessert from a coffee place called Java Coast. It was in the hotel's gigantic lobby, right next to their re-creation of St. Augustine's Castillo de San Marcos. Their pastries looked good in their display case and I decided to get a Cinnamon Bavarian Twist. The Cinnamon Bavarian Twist had a consistency similar to that of a doughnut. Doughnut wasn't exactly what I was thinking of when I saw the pastry in the case, but it was still tasty. I just wish it had the flaky, crunchy crust that I've had elsewhere with similar desserts.
On my second day in Hershey, PA, I ate breakfast in a restaurant called the Cocoa Diner (or Cocoa Grill depending on the sign). I had an egg & cheese croissant served with hashed browns. There was hardly any cheese in the sandwich so it tasted kind of bland. The hashed browns were good though...
After breakfast, I went to Hersheypark...
After riding roller coasters all morning, I ate lunch at the Tudor Grill...
I ate a sandwich called a Rachel with turkey and sourkraut on it.
