Restaurant Review: Jax Beach Seafood of Jacksonville, Florida

Jax Beach Seafood is a small restaurant that lies south of downtown Jacksonville, Florida. The restaurant, or rather, the large shack, overlooks the busy University boulevard beyond. One may eat inside the place or venture out onto its spacious veranda.

Jax Beach Seafood offers quite a number of seafood items. There are appetizers such as fried mushrooms, onion rings, conch fritters, crab bites, oyster cocktail, and gator tail. One may also order one of the place's many sandwiches, like the shrimp sandwich, the oyster sandwich, tuna salad sandwich, and the soft shell crab sandwich.

There are also full dinners available, which are served either cold or hot. For cold dinners, there are items like the shrimp salad, tuna salad, cold boiled shrimp, and cold seafood combo (with shrimp, crabmeat, and oysters).

Hot dinners are much more plentiful and include lots of seafood, and even non-seafood, combinations. Some such items are the steak and lobster, steak and shrimp, and chicken strips and scallops. One can order other pure seafood combinations too, like shrimp and oysters, scallops and soft shell crab, and Grouper and shrimp. Finally, one may get fish alone, with Snapper, Grouper, Flounder, and Trout featured most prominently. Side items include hush puppies, fries, coleslaw, baked potato, salad, and applesauce.

On a recent drive-by in southern Jacksonville, a friend and I stopped in at Jax Beach Seafood for an early dinner. The place was pretty well packed, and it wasn't even a Friday. There was no real waiting area, so we just walked up to the counter located in the back of the building and looked around for a place to sit. A maitre d'/waitress placed us at a small table and came back with menus.

We decided to order one of the specials of the evening, which was a platter of 20 shrimp with 2 sides and hush puppies. One could order the shrimp either fried or grilled. We decided on grilled.

Our condiments and coleslaw came quickly and in a kind of pre-prepared box. We waited and waited for the shrimp to arrive, and watched as several new customers came after us and were served. We noticed that all the new customers were ordering fried items; could grilling something take that long?

Finally, just as we were about to get up and walk out (we had been waiting at least 30 minutes), the long-awaited shrimp platters arrived. However, the hush puppies were missing. When we inquired after them, we were told that there was a back-order on the pups.

I dug into my platter of shrimp. The shrimp were alright at best, but not the most spectacular that I've ever had in my life. In fact, they tasted like they had been freezer-burned. My baked potato was decent, but there was no real butter for it, only margarine.

After another 15 minutes had passed, the hush puppies arrived. For all the demand on them, they did not taste anything out of the ordinary.

We couldn't understand how Jax Beach Seafood could be so popular when it made such lackluster food that had to be waited on for almost an hour. I doubt I'll be returning to that place in the future. However, for those of you who might be curious, here is some more information about the place:

Jax Beach Seafood Restaurant
4309 University Blvd. South
Jacksonville, FL 32216
Phone: 904-733-9008