Cheese Whiz & PBR

King Street Blues, located in the heart of Old Town Alexandria was the destination last Friday for my friend, regular commenter, and native North Carolinian Elizabeth’s birthday dinner. With high hopes and empty stomachs, we made the trek down King Street... and left fairly disappointed.

Starting off with an appetizer of hush puppies and fries with a side of beer cheese, we had more fun playing with our food (our parents would have been very upset) than we did eating it.

The hush puppies were mealy, small, and a bit overcooked on the outside, while somehow being undercooked on the inside. The fries were unacceptably soggy and barely warm. There were a lot of them, but the quantity couldn’t make up for what ended up being fairly pedestrian fries.



And then there was the beer cheese. Though I neglected to take a picture, imagine, if you will, a large bowl of lumpy cheese whiz mixed with some warm PBR. That’s it. That’s beer cheese in all its horrible glory. And to think – people eat this stuff.

My main course, a fried shrimp po’ boy, was decent. The bread was just right, and the shrimp were good enough to get by. The sandwich came with a side of chips, which I’m sure were well intended, but were too soggy to be potato chips, and too much like a potato chip to be anything else – so in the end, the only thing they were was left sitting on my plate.



Being Elizabeth’s birthday, we requested a complimentary birthday cake – which ended up being an incredibly dense, yet almost inedible chocolate cake with flavorless chocolate ice cream on top. Needless to say, another dish went unfinished. [Edit: Ant is not known to pass up free food. It must have been bad. ~Jill]

The only saving grace of King Street Blues was the service, which was pretty solid and resulted in me drinking gallon of Sprite in order to wash down the aftertaste of the beer cheese.

In the end, it was a shame that we couldn’t do justice to a genre of food born in the same mountains as my friend Elizabeth. The hush puppies, the fries, the sandwich, and everything else I tasted (both from my plate and from the plates of my friends) was disappointing to say the least.

On the bright side, only eight more months until the 24th Annual Barbecue Festival in Lexington, North Carolina!

King Street Blues
(703) 836‑8800
St. Asaph Street South
Old Town, VA
(1 block from King Street in Old Town, Alexandria)
King Street Blues