JR's Island BBQ leaves you fat and happy

Not everything worth eating comes with a dining room. JR's Island BBQ is a food truck parked in the lot of Robyn Branch Design on South Eighth Street, right across from Hot Paws, and it’s doing its best to feed you. I went back three times over the course of a week trying to get a full picture of what’s offered. The picture, as it turns out, is mixed, but there's more good here than the setting might suggest.

The setting, to be fair, isn't exactly working in their favor. There’re a few chairs and a table outside, but no awning over them, which in July in Florida means they might as well not exist. When I pulled up, a fireworks stand had taken up residence right next door. You order through a window and the wait was reasonable, about seven or eight minutes both times I timed it. The owner inside was consistently kind and genuinely pleasant to deal with.

On my first visit, I ordered the pulled pork sandwich and the smash burger, each with a side. The pulled pork is generous: you're getting a lot of meat on that sandwich, and the barbecue sauce has a nice tangy zip to it that I really enjoyed. The issue is the pork itself, which was relatively bland and had more gristle mixed in than I was hoping for. Some extra sauce helped, and the pickle slices are a good call, but I couldn't fully get past the lack of flavor in the meat itself. The mac and cheese on the side was fine, a little salty, recognizably cheesy in texture.

The smash burger was the more enjoyable of the two, with one small caveat: it's not really a smash burger. If you go in expecting the paper-thin, lacy-edged patties you'd get at a place like Tasty's, you're going to be confused. What you actually get is a solid double cheeseburger — two thicker patties, grilled onions, American cheese. The fries were crinkle cut but nothing I’d write home about.

By my third visit I’d recalibrated my expectations, and things went better for it. The shrimp dinner, $20 with two sides, was genuinely good. Plump, juicy, well-seasoned shrimp with hush puppies that leaned more toward corn fritter than traditional hush puppy. The onion rings were exactly what onion rings from a food truck are. And the coleslaw was coleslaw. I also tried the hot dog with baked beans, and both tasted exactly how you’d expect. None of it was bad. All of it was heavy.

That's really the throughline here. JR's Island BBQ is deep-fried, barbecue-forward, carb-heavy food truck cooking, and if you go in knowing that, you'll leave full and reasonably satisfied. It's the kind of food that makes you want to lie down afterward. On a lazy summer afternoon that’s not a complaint. One visit was briefly derailed by a gentleman who had arrived by bicycle, pulled up a chair directly in front of the order window, and spent several minutes quietly arguing with his phone.

JR's Island BBQ is not going to be everyone's favorite. But if you're in that stretch of South Eighth Street, the owner is there, the food comes out fast, and you will absolutely leave full. Sometimes that's the whole job.