gtk — Restaurant in Jersey City

GTK is a great idea, I love love love the concept, and the food is fairly good. However their portions and prices just don't work. I picked up a steak sandwich myself and only tipped 18% (which I do feel a bit bad about). My total was twenty one bucks, and the sandwich was TINY! It was a bit under six inches long, and not particularly fully packed.

Literally next door at the deli you can get a larger and better tasting steak sandwich for seven fifty. One block north you could go sit at Gringos and get two steak tacos and a beer which would be more food and a drink for for the same price.

I'm focusing on this one sandwich, and I see the owner does comment on reviews about portion sizes and price saying that their are more "value" items on the menu. I mean... OK. Yes, if you get a bowl of mostly rice, it is slightly cheaper but still quite overpriced compared to even Manhattan.

If GTK cut their prices in half, it would be an OK value. If they reduced by 40% I might still go there occasionally. But I honestly don't understand the business model here. When ordering, it did not occur to me that a twenty dollar steak sandwich would leave me still hungry.

Two stars because the sandwich...

I'm not sure how this place has a 4.8 star review currently. I haven't had any issue with ordering online or the pickup experience, but that's not really the problem. I ordered from here a while back after walking past it many times and being intrigued, but everyone I got food for agreed that it tasted quite strange. I can't speak for their whole menu, but I tried multiple items that were supposed to be asian-style food and found them to have an incredibly unusual flavor, tasting nothing like teriyaki or any other asian flavor; it tasted more like an autumn-scented air freshener if that makes any sense.

I decided to try it again recently, and was again disappointed. I ordered the pulled pork mac and cheese, and not only did it not come with the barbecue sauce it says it does on the menu, but there was hardly any cheese either. Most of the cheese was gluing the pork together, creating basically cheesy pork with buttered noodles.

In all, none of these are deathly sins. The food is adequate, and if you're hungry it'll do. However, it's pretty dang expensive for what you're getting. I'd look elsewhere unless you know of a menu item that is...

I'll start by saying the flavors were delicious and on point. There was plenty of seasoning and sauce and it was good to the last bite. We got the Buffalo and Jerk Wings, as well as a Greek salad.

The issue is that there weren't many bites to begin with. For $15+ wings and a $11+ salad, you would expect to get wings with a little meat on the bones. As you can see from the pictures, the celery was packing more meat than the actual wings were!

The wings couldn't have been bigger than 2-3 inches long. The jerk wing (on the left) was a wing so aside from being tiny, it had two huge bones in it. The buffalo wing (right) appeared to be chopped through the bone so that one wing was turned into two. The salad was also very small. We were hoping to share the salad between two people but it ended up barely being enough for one person.

All-in-all, we spent close to $50 and were still hungry afterwards. Again, the flavors were on point and if they sell their sauces it's worth grabbing. However, unless you plan to have a second dinner immediately after this one, I'd...