Food: David's Real Pit BBQ

Nestled in a little out-of-the-way shopping center well north of the University of Florida, David's Real Pit BBQ is one of those places that's almost good enough to recommend to other people, but not quite. It's a typical fast-food-ish BBQ place (they have a drive-through, and they have no waiters or waitresses).

The main highlight here, as their homepage suggests, is the voluminous variety of sauces you can slather on your BBQed meat - they have a whole rack full of 'em. Many are quite good - I had some "Old St. Augustine"-something-or-other hot sauce that went very well with my order of ribs. I had had some BBQ chicken and baked beans at a previous event (that's what led me to the restaurant in the first place), and both of those were pretty good.

There are quite a few drawbacks. The prices were very high, for one thing - I could have gotten an "all you can eat" order of ribs at Sonny's for the same price. While half the ribs were big and meaty, the other half (I'm guessing the crappy part of the pig) was dry and very tough - almost like pork jerky. The cole slaw and corn on the cob were passable, but not noteworthy in any way. Dessert - a Key Lime pie plucked from the fridge - was downright poor, as the marshmallow topping on the pie kept forming into slimy pieces in my mouth.

The jury's still sort of out on this one. I was tempted to give it only one star, but I'll see how I feel about it after going to bed tonight.

2/4 stars