Last week I decided to try a new restaurant called J-Petal. According to their website, it’s a Japanese crepe and Thai ice-cream shop. They have a few locations around the east coast, Ohio, and Tennessee. The Blacksburg location had just opened and some friends and I decided to try it out while they were having their BOGO promotion (buy one, get one 50% off).
The menu had a range of items with listings of sweet crepes, savory crepes, ice creams, milkshakes, and light bulb drinks. The location is quite small and given the crowd, at that particular time, we weren’t sure we’d get a table. However, given the lack of quickness of preparing the food, by the time ours was ready a table had opened up. I’m a hot food person so I choose to go with a savory crepe, the Shrimp Avocado, oreo Thai ice cream, and a non-alcoholic light bulb drink (it was 1 PM and I was attending a graduation later).
So before I get into my review I shall preface this by saying: this is my first time having a Japanese crepe. With that said, I wasn’t really a fan of it. It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. The crepe was not hot. If you can imagine throwing your salad into a crepe, you’d get this dish. The spicy mayo sauce was good and I probably could’ve eaten the entire thing if I had more sauce to provide flavor because it lacked it severely.
The Thai ice cream was good, pretty much your standard cookies and cream/oreo ice-cream in pretty packaging.
The highlight for me had to be the lightbulb drink. Why? Well:
- It’s an actual lightbulb (it’s plastic but still the shape #wow)
- It lights up! It was an unexpected surprise when they turned the light on prior to handing it to me. I felt like a kid I was so happy.
- It was really good!
Keep in mind that if you decide to keep the lightbulb as a souvenir (because why wouldn’t you?) it’s a pain in the 🙊 to get any sort of fruit out (the limes almost made me say that it wasn’t worth keeping). I literally found old tweezers to pull the limes out.
In general, I probably wouldn’t go back and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone either. Unless you’re a vegetarian. In my *non-professional* opinion, I think this place is a good place to eat if you actually like eating salads (not those of us who have to eat them). Overall it lacked flavor and satisfies a different palate than those probably used to European style crepes. Presentation of food was superb.