BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse - (San Antonio - I-10 W)

Reviews

• ★★★★½ Shishito Peppers Visited Oct 13, 2017

  Tried Shishito Peppers For The First Time

  I've only eaten at BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse a handful of times so far, and this visit came about because one of my friends wanted to get a group together for dinner. We ended up picking this location out along I-10, and once we sat down we decided to order our own individual entrees but split a bunch of random appetizers between the table to share while we waited.
  
  Out of everything we ordered, the dish that really caught my eye on the menu was the shishito peppers, so we got an appetizer portion of those to share around the table. When it arrived, it was a full plate of baked shishito peppers seasoned in oil and seasoning, with baked pepperoni slices mixed in throughout. The pepperoni added a nice bit of textural contrast, with some slices baked up crisp, kind of like the crisp pepperoni you'd get on a pizza, while others stayed a little softer and chewier, and you could tell just by looking which ones were which.
  
  The peppers themselves had really good flavor from the oil and seasoning they were cooked in, but what made them especially fun to eat as a table was the randomness of the heat, with a few being mild, the next medium, then one coming in noticeably hotter and catching whoever bit into it off guard. When that happened, the pepperoni mixed in actually helped take some of the edge off the heat, which worked out nicely.
  
  Overall it was a fun experience, and BJ's menu has a lot of varied options to pick from. The shishito peppers in particular were something I'd never had before, and it's a more Asian-inspired item than what you'd typically expect off a menu like this, one I'll be keeping an eye out for at other restaurants going forward.

  — Paul