Gandules Grill Restaurant in Lehigh Acres

This restaurant was recommended to us a couple of years ago and its been so long I forget who recommended it! So, when we’ve driven by it for the last couple of years we say, yeah, we should go there and try it out sometime, and we finally did! Of course, we dragged another couple with us to get another perspective. It was interesting. We wanted to make reservations. So I went online to look up their website and try to find a phone number. The website is no longer there! It was there the week before, but now its gone. I went to TripAdvisor and Yelp. No phone numbers!? And conflicting hours. We wanted to go on Tuesday at 5pm, but TripAdvisor said they were closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Yelp said they were open seven days a week. So my wife and I happened to be in the area on Tuesday around lunch, so we stopped by. It was 11:50am and the sign said they open at 12 noon. I tried the door and it was locked. I looked inside and saw a whole bunch of people in the kitchen. They turned to look at who was jangling the door. I smiled and waved, but nobody came over to talk. So we left. We told the other couple that they appear to be open and working, so we’ll just show up without a reservation later that day and see what happens.

So we show up at 5pm and they won’t let us in without a reservation! I’m just kidding. There were only two other tables in there that early. We were shown to a booth in the far corner of the restaurant. I explained to our waiter about their website being down, different hours on Yelp and TripAdvisor and no phone number to be found anywhere. First thing he says is “we don’t have a phone number”. So I sit there thinking to myself “what? why the hell not? you have to have a phone number! you got to talk to people, vendors, etc, etc., take a reservation, whatever”. It was apparent to me that this was not the guy I should be talking to. He took notes on everything, but here it is two weeks later and the website is still down and Yelp and TripAdvisor are still not in sync and I can’t find a phone number anywhere.

Well, that’s that, so here we go. The shopping center the restaurant is located in has its entrance on the right side towards the back, like where you would expect service vehicles and deliveries to go to. I guess Lee County traffic people didn’t want the shopping center to have and entrance/exit onto Lee Blvd. So, after winding your way through the parking lot, and get inside the restaurant… here’s what it looks like:

Its a Puerto Rican restaurant. I was expecting a lot of colorful decorations, but no. Kind of modern-ish. The TVs over the bar just kept showing pictures of their food. All the pics looked good! There were even pictures of the food on the menu. The problems I’ve heard about putting pictures of the food on the menu is that the person ordering that picture of food is now going to expect that when he gets his food put down in front of him that its going to look exactly like the picture. So, of course, I order the lobster and shrimp dish and it doesn’t look anything like the picture! It looked nice, but the picture in the menu looked a lot better.

Let’s talk about the drinks first. I ordered a Pina Colada. Delicious and pretty. I forget the name of the other fancy drink ordered, but it did look fantastic too! It tasted great too, but did it have any booze in it? None of us could taste the booze, but it did taste good. I tasted the booze in my Pina Colada and my wife’s Mojito. We didn’t complain to the waiter, or maybe we did, but it didn’t get anywhere because of a communication barrier. Anyway, we’re all still happy and placed our food order. I’ve never had mofongo, so I can’t wait for that to see what that’s all about. Plantains are high in carbs.

Our food took a good 40 minutes to be delivered from the time we placed the order. They may have been defrosting my lobster tail under running water. They probably don’t get many lobster orders, so that’s what I’m thinking. I may be wrong. Maybe they are just slow! It wasn’t crowded, so its not that they were busy in the kitchen. Everybody liked their food. The mofongo had mixed reviews. I think that was because it was just a slab of plain mofongo, crushed plantains, without any sauces or other food involved.

The shrimps were nice, big and cooked perfectly. My lobster was great. The garlic butter sauce was fantastic. The steak was the best steak they’ve had in a long time and would have made a dynamite steak fajitas according to Andrew who ordered it. The prices were pretty reasonable. My Shrimp and Lobster dish was $40. We did have a flan at the end. It was the firmest flan I ever had, but still tasty. Would we go back? Hard to say. I guess we’re on the fence with this one. The food was the best part. Maybe if the inside of the place was more interesting, better interaction with the waitstaff, less wait time and drinks had more of a punch we would definitely go back! But I don’t see any harm in checking it out! You might think its the cat’s meow!

I can’t give you a link to their website, but here is their Yelp Page and TripAdvisor Page.

Coming soon…. I will be posting some wildlife pictures and other pics from car and air shows. I also spent some time in an airplane graveyard near Phoenix and will also post lots of those pics. Here’s a pic from Six Mile Cypress Slough taken this week.