Wow! This was so not what I expected. It was listed in an article as one of the top 25 unique things to do in the summer on Long Island. Well, we attended the Battle of the BBQ Brethren NY championship today and it was pretty bad! It’s a 2-day event… One thing they don’t tell you is day one is fully dedicated to ‘prep.’ There’s no cooked food, and all the competitors are just quietly preparing the next day. The second day is the day when all the judging happens. With that said, the BBQ competitors made it pretty clear that they were not allowed to give, or sell, attendees samples of the BBQ food they were sampling. Hello?! Then why have outside people come and attend?! If we can’t try the food, then what the hell is the point!!! I expected this event to be teeming with people. Instead, it was almost completely empty and we almost felt like we were intruding or weren’t supposed to be there. We tried to salvage the afternoon and hoped for a little bit of tasty BBQ from the one true BBQ vendor at the event(I’m not counting hotdogs/hamburgers here). Unfortunately, that was not to be. The pulled BBQ chicken sandwich was bland and boring and the cheap, squishy roll fell apart immediately. We also got some curly fries at only other non-BBQ food vendor(not counting the zeppole people) and sadly they were the worst fries I’ve ever had. Clearly they don’t change their frying oil much, and we assume they must sell fried fish too, because the fries alternated between tasting like fish and dirt. The straw that broke the camel’s back: a rather rude Toyota salesman selectively soliciting people to enter his raffle. He stopped my boyfriend to ask him if he wanted to enter a raffle to win a gift certificate. He didn’t even acknowledge my presence or ask me to enter the raffle. After he finished speaking, I asked if I could have a raffle ticket, or if women weren’t allowed to have them. I don’t usually say things like that, but his condescending attitude was very obvious and insulting. This place is hosted at a biker bar called the Maples. One of the competitors intimated that there might be some food to try on Sunday that would be in trays inside the Maples, but the odds of getting any would be slim given all the people in the bar. Two Positives Notes: 1. I got a really funny BBQ joke shirt for my father. 2. The net proceeds of the event go to charity. This was definitely not worth the trip– A huge ‘fail’ in my book! We wound up at Bobby’s Burger Palace, where they actually know how to make presentable, super tasty food. We should’ve gone to the Italian feast/fair that was happening in Glen Cove, this weekend. Oh well, you can’t bat 1000% every time!
