what do I know

This weekend we met up with my wife’s parents for dinner at a local fish house called Bonefish Willy’s Riverfront Grille. My wife and I have eaten lunch here quite a few times and really like the food, so we were eager to try out the dinner menu to see what was different. Bonefish Willy’s has a really great location right on the river south of Lake Washington Road on Pineapple Drive. Inside dining is available but the bulk of their seating is outside on the deck with the tiki bar overlooking the river. The building itself could use some major work, but the food is worth overlooking the “amenities”. As far as beers, they have your basic domestics on tap as well Kona Fire Rock Pale Ale and Guinness as well as a decent selection of bottled beers.

So for the evening we showed up between lunch and dinner and we had our choice of menus. We ordered the Maryland Crab Cake appetizer (~$9), the Island Chicken Caesar Wrap (~$9) which came with pasta salad, the Grouper Willy sandwich which came with pasta salad (~$9), the Snook Bruschetta Pasta (~$22), and the Sea Scallop dinner (~$20). The wrap is a typical chicken caesar wrap but you can have the chicken prepared as cajun, jerked, or grilled. The grouper sandwich is really good and served on pumpernickel with pineapple coleslaw and cheddar cheese. The pasta salad is possibly some of the best pasta salad I’ve ever had. The appetizer came with 2 crab cakes that were made of lump and claw crab meat, fried, and came with a side of remoulade; I will definitely order these again, they were delicious. The dinner meals were a little more of a dissapointment, but the dinner menu has some awesome looking choices so I would just suggest trying something else besides what we ordered. The Sea Scallops were served in a mushroom and white wine sauce. We found that even though the scallops were very tender, the sauce gave the scallops a bit of a bitter taste (they were also a bit sandy). The Snook Bruschetta was angel hair pasta with a large piece of snook and a diced tomato and scallion mixture on top, then topped with melted mozarella. The cheese was a bit too much for the meal and I found myself putting a lot of lemon on the dish to mask the flavor. For dessert, we ordered our favorite, the Brownie a la mode (~$6) which is a light chocolate brownie topped with chocolate sauce and coconut served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. There were also a couple coffees and teas in the mix (~$2 a piece).

There were a few menu items off the dinner menu I’d still like to try (e.g. - coconut curry chicken), but I think we may stick to lunch going forward if for nothing else but the price point; the prices seem to be 3x that of lunch for dinner. Just for the sake of mentioning, the jerked Mahi-Mahi sandwich is another great choice from the lunch menu.

Overall, Bonefish Willy’s is a great restaurant in a great location that could use a new building. The quality of the food is great and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone in the Brevard area that is looking for a great place for lunch.

Bonefish Willy’s Riverfront Grille is located on the intercoastal at 2459 Pineapple Ave # B, Melbourne, FL.

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