{"id":83,"date":"2007-11-03T21:43:20","date_gmt":"2007-11-04T01:43:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=83"},"modified":"2009-02-12T04:56:58","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T04:56:58","slug":"jupiterwest-palm-beach-eats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/03\/jupiterwest-palm-beach-eats\/","title":{"rendered":"Jupiter\/West Palm Beach eats."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I was down in Jupiter for a high school showcase event &#8211; bit of a dud, really, but I had to go at least once to check it out &#8211; and hit a few new places while revisiting two spots I went to in the spring.<\/p>\n<p>En route to West Palm Beach airport, I had a layover at Reagan Airport in DC, and noticed a Five Guys burger stand, which was named the best food outlet at that airport in a recent <a href= http:\/\/www.meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=73>Portfolio.com<\/a> article. So I went. And I ate. For airport food, it&#8217;s off the charts, and I&#8217;d rate it above In-n-Out in the fast food burger category. The fries are the key &#8211; hand-cut, like In-n-Out&#8217;s, but thicker, and a regular order comes with more fries than I could eat in a sitting. The burgers are thicker than In-n-Out&#8217;s, of roughly equivalent quality, but because they only cook burgers well done, the patties start to dry out, which one can compensate for somewhat with extra ketchup, but it&#8217;s not the same thing. There is also a Five Guys in Palm Beach at the Legacy Mall, on PGA Blvd, which I hit on the way back to the airport to head home. (One side note: Five Guys was apparently named DC&#8217;s best burger by some publication that apparently doesn&#8217;t know its ass from its elbow. I can name two places within five miles of my house that serve better burgers &#8211; thicker, juicier, and cooked to order. There&#8217;s no way Washington doesn&#8217;t have some pub or diner that serves a quality half-pounder.)<\/p>\n<p>Actually in Jupiter, then, I hit two new (to me) places in a strip mall right near the Cardinals&#8217;\/Marlins&#8217; complex, on the north side of Donald Ross Rd between Central Blvd and Military Trail. The better of the two was Pyros Grill, a funky, upscale fast-food place that serves &#8220;bowls&#8221; and wraps where you go down a checklist of ingredients, pick what you want, and it&#8217;s heated and served to you. The dishes are built around a &#8220;protein&#8221; &#8211; marinated steak, chicken, or black beans &#8211; and you can add various condiment-veggies (like scallions or cucumbers, but not more nutritious vegetables like broccoli) and choose a sauce. I went twice and ordered the same thing both times, the &#8220;Big Kahuna&#8221; bowl, which includes your choice of meats, scallions, cucumbers, onions, and a pineapple-teriyaki sauce. It was delicious, but a regular bowl wasn&#8217;t enough food for lunch, so I&#8217;d imagine most folks would want the large. I&#8217;d also like to see the food served a bit hotter; the meat is obviously cooked and chilled, then reheated before serving. Anyway, it was a boon to find a healthy option so close to the ballpark.<\/p>\n<p>In the same strip mall is Thai Garden Palace (at least, I think that was the name, but Google Maps says it&#8217;s &#8220;Thai Grand Place&#8221;, so what the bleep do I know). I expected the place to be authentic, given the d\u00c3\u00a9cor and the heavy accents of everyone working there, and maybe the food <b>was<\/b> authentic &#8211; but I&#8217;ve never had pad thai arrive as noodles sitting in a pool of sauce. The ingredients were fresh, and the chicken was cooked properly, but it was more like a noodle soup than a noodle stir-fry. The chicken-and-shrimp dumplings were large and full of both meats, but had very little flavor of their own and required both the &#8220;special&#8221; soy sauce that came with it (which tasted like every other soy sauce I&#8217;ve ever had) and a shot of the hot sauce on the table.<\/p>\n<p>The revisits were a mixed bag. I went back to the Gelato Grotto in Palm Beach Gardens, and I was disappointed. I&#8217;m pretty sure the problem was that the freezer cases were too cold, so the gelato was hard and the flavors were dulled. I went with dark chocolate and toasted almond and just didn&#8217;t get a lot of taste. I also went to McCray&#8217;s II, the little barbecue stand on 45th Street in West Palm, at about 7 pm on a Thursday night, and they were out of pulled pork and BBQ beef, so I went with the ribs, which were very good &#8211; tender, could have come off the bone more easily, with a nice mild sauce with a hint of pepper to it. I&#8217;m still not sure why barbecue often comes with toasted white sandwich bread, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I was down in Jupiter for a high school showcase event &#8211; bit of a dud, really, but I had to go at least once to check it out &#8211; and hit a few new places while revisiting two spots I went to in the spring. En route to West Palm Beach airport, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[69,128,145,300],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","tag-burgers","tag-florida","tag-gelato","tag-thai-cuisine","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":569,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions\/569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}