Ray J’s American Grill

I give Ray J’s two stars for having a decent beer menu. Sans the beer selection, and there’s no doubt this would be a 1-​star review.
Sunday night, wife, kid, and I went for dinner around 6:30pm. We scored a booth in the bar, which wasn’t overly busy, so all good in that regard.
My wife ordered some sort of chicken, which came with a salad, if that’s what you want to call it. The salad was a plate of lettuce (not even the fancy lettuce with the carrots and purple romaine mixed in, just plain lettuce.) On the side of the plate, she also received 3 sticks of purple onions, 2 cherry tomatoes, and 2 cucumber slices. That’s it! No cheese, no croutons, etc. She said her chicken was okay, but ate very little of it, so I question that.
For me, I noticed that Ray J’s had a buffalo chicken sandwich, but no wrap. They offered some sort of other wrap, but not a buffalo chicken. So, I asked the waiter if I could order off-​menu and just turn the buffalo chicken sandwich into a wrap, which he said «yes». When it arrived, this thing was no larger than a bean burrito at Taco Bell. And, at $ 12, I would have rather had the Taco Bell bean burrito! It had zero flavor, certainly nothing with any sort of buffalo flavor, and was so small that I was still hungry after eating it. Fortunately, I received a whole plate full of fries, but that didn’t make up for the kids-​sized wrap I received.
My son is 4, so he ordered from the kids menu — mini corn dogs and a side of fruit. No real complaints there. And, he ate all of them, so they must have been decent.
Outside of the terrible food, my biggest complaint was probably related to the service. We ordered as a family (all at the same time), but for some reason, the waiter opted to bring out my wife’s plate of lettuce first, then 5 minutes later, my son’s meal came out, which he started in on immediately. 10 more minutes passed and my wife’s meal came out, and finally 8 more minutes passed and my meal arrived. Of course, by the time my meal arrived, my son was already done. Therefore, I got to scarf my meal down in 3 minutes as to avoid any meltdowns by my son who was now ready to go. Fortunately, with the wrap I ordered being no more than 6 bites, I was able to get it down and chug the remains of my beer before paying for our $ 60 meal that should have been no more than $ 20, given the quality of the food and the portion sizes.
Needless to say, we won’t be back. Ray J’s clearly was built/​decorated in the early 90’s (and hasn’t changed since) and the place smells. Moreover, while seated, one of the cooks came out of the kitchen into the dining area in a pair of jogging shorts and a white t-​shirt — he didn’t look very sanitary, so surely someone I’d keep away from customers. Finally, the food and service sucked. All that said, I think I’m being generous with 2 stars, but surely can’t think of a good reason to visit this place again.

This is one of the worst places to eat in Woodbury, I have never had to send food back each of the 3 times I’ve been there. The ribs and chicken: Ribs were so over cooked couldn’t chew it and they hid my little piece of chicken under the fries hoping I wouldn’t see how small it was. The salad was mostly lettuce, the onions were so strong I took most off but still tasted them an hour later. My kids meal cheeseburger was so overdone he can use to play hockey. Their famous wings, and ribs are big but chew off the bone, I like my chicken ribs to easily fall off the bone. Waitress and staff were great, they need Chef Ramsey big time!!! Lead chef should taste the crap coming out of kitchen. I tried 3 times and will never be back. I tipped the waitress well, felt bad for her.

A local popular place and always want to check it out.
Sports bar and famous for their wings.
Went there and the place was packed around 5:40pm.
Got lucky to got a seat and still got happy hour menu before 6pm.
We ordered the famous chicle wings with jalapeño and Asian teriyaki sauces, onion ring, Asian beef (it comes with onion rings too, hmm, shld hv told us), and a dip, and a pepperoni pizza. Yeah all of them only half price. And All of them are tasty but the jalapeño is really spicy, watch out.
Maybe too many people, the wings and pizza come out first but not hot just lukewarm. U know pizza need be hot to be tasty. At least for me.
Wld have been four star if not this and the wrong price they charged me for beer.
Some good options for drafted beer and I ordered a Wisconsin local beer and that’s good. Wife liked it too. The only thing they charged me the wrong large price of the beer when I got the small one. I let it go.
Overall nice place to hangout with family and friends and good value if u can live with the app and pizza menu in happy hour time.
Wl try other dishes next time…

Enjoyed this experience. Was staying next door in town on business. Great local beer and the wings are huge. They give you the whole thing not just the drum. The sauces we tried were great and the service was pretty decent. Nice pub bar feel to Oran’s let us pick the channel on tv next to our table. Would go back when in town again.

Bf & I shared a bacon cheeseburger with tater tots, and a chicken nachos. The cheeseburger was good, but the nachos weren’t. It was an enormous plate with cheese that was as hard as the chips and almost no chicken. We ate less than a third of it. Our server was nice but not exceptional and didn’t care much that our nachos had only like three little pieces of chicken in it. Prices seem a tad high for the fare.

Service: Hostess was welcoming and polite. Waitress was nice and knowledgeable of the beer menu.
Drinks:
Margarita was poorly made and mainly tasted of cheap Margarita mix. A lot of salt came on the rim and it frequently fell off onto my shirt when I took a sip. The Electric Berry Lemonade was better than the Margarita. Husband said his Bloody Mary was decent and his beer was good.
Food:
Sesame Beef Tips appetizer was really good. I enjoyed it and I thought that this was the best dish of the lunch we had. The Chinese dumplings tasted/​looked like they were frozen but I thought they were decent. I liked the spicy orange mayo based sauce on both the dumplings and beef tips plates.
Husband said his Cuban sandwich was really greasy (the grease was just dripping onto his plate and the bottom bun of the sandwich fell apart in his hands). Cuban was also overstuffed with the type of bun they had served it on. My husband wouldn’t classify it as a «real» Cuban b/​c they didn’t use the correct type of bread for the Cuban sandwich. Granite City Brewery has a Cuban sandwich that far surpasses this Cuban sandwich.

Dry rub wings were very tasty, and Monday night ½ lb burger special is second to none. Lots of beers on tap! Enjoyed everything and the service too!

Ordered wings, which they said would be 20 min. So while my wife and i waited we ordered side salads. They told us the dressing is a house dressing, creamy garlic. The lettuce was very rusty, and the dressing was tough to take down. Slightly thicker than cool whip, you couldn’t spread it on anything so i ended up dipping the lettuce in the thick stuff. The wings were pretty good but so salty. The waitstaff didnt refill water glasses. We tried it but probably don’t need to go back. The wings, in my opinion, don’t stand up to wcco’s best of award.

Excellent experience on a Sunday afternoon! Alisha our server was awesome. She made sure our drinks were full, was sweet, and helpful. The food was also excellent! I had the spit roasted chicken and my husband had the wings (nutty rooster sauce). The garlic sauce was amazing and the wing sauce was super good. Everyone else with our group was also impressed. We will be back soon!

Waited almost an hour for food, food was definitely not worth the wait. Chances are I won’t be back

My husband and I stopped and ate dinner here on Saturday night. We arrived around 5pm and was seated immediately, which was really the only nice part of the visit. We ordered our drinks and the wings, which we asked for before our entrée’s. We proceeded to wait 20 minutes, drinks are empty and the waitress finally stopped to refill the drinks and said the wings should be out shortly. We then waited another 20 minutes. The place was not too busy when we got there, as we sat waiting the place was much more lively and busy. Once we received the wings after the 45 minutes we both were surprised by the amount of sauce on the wings! They had so much sauce on them, the plate was drenched, it looked like they just poured the sauce over the top and had not coated all the wings. We have been here several times prior to this and never had them prepared so sloppy before.
We then got our entrees about 10 minutes later, my husband ordered the Chicken Fresco and I ordered the Chicken Parmesan. My husband said his sandwich was ‘alright’ not bad but not good either. My meal was a disappointment, the chicken was the only good part of the meal, but it lacked Parmesan cheese. Which is kinda needed on Chicken Parmesan. The penne noodles had the worst red sauce I have tasted, jarred sauce was better then this. It had no flavor, just a tomato juice flavor with salt added, bland and blah. Then they added way too much mozzarella cheese, probably to mask the nasty red sauce!
Maybe I should not expect a great Italian style meal from a bar, but I figured they have a good pasta selection on the menu, and have wood-​fired grilled pizzas, maybe just maybe it will be great.
As with other patrons, the service is slow, the employees do not seem happy to be there and it shows. My husband and I both discussed taking this restaurant off the list of viable places to have a meal.

first time at this location, normally I go to the one in Northeast.
Overall everything was the same other than the size of the space, this was bigger.
Homestyle wings are always a must! this time they were a tad bit salty, but still delicious. and did i mention that the garlic sauce is life?!
pizza fries were ok, 2.5 stars. just kinda boring but did the job.
Awesome deals during HH.
Service was very slow, but very friendly.

I go for the happy hour! I love the wings here and they’re half of during happy hour win win. I also recommend the beef tips.

Stopped in for happy hour and they have half price apps but no big specials on any drinks that are worth mentioning. We got the artichoke dip, pot stickers, and one other bland item that is apparently so pitiful I cannot even remember it. The pot stickers were fried – not steamed and they had a very hot «wing-​type» sauce too dang spicy and not the flavor i was looking for. The dip was bland and served with big chunks of bread. I did not care for the atmosphere or the crowd. Service was sad — -I did ask for a wine at one point but he did not remember to bring it to me so I ended up just drinking my water. If I end up in here again it will be under protest!

I finally went to try their wings and… not what I was expecting. My Mom is a regular of theirs, so she suggested getting the sauces on the side and trying a couple. While that was a good call (the sauces were all tasty), the wings were the driest most overcooked wings I have ever tried to eat.
We were there on a Monday night, so 3 of the 4 of us got the burger special. Basically it’s a cheeseburger with choice of potato for $ 6, all extra toppings $.50 extra each. Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, it is (especially because one of the potato options is tater tots — YES), except for the fact that the standards that come on any burger you order (lettuce, tomato, pickle) also cost $.50 each.
$.50 for a piece of lettuce. Yeah, I was kinda shocked, too. While it was a good burger, and a good deal, I had such a negative reaction for $.50 lettuce that it overshadowed the burger itself.
Also, lots of talk on here about bad service, and I was like…‘how can it be that bad? It’s not a new place, and people flock there’. Yeah, it is that bad. Waitress was scatterbrained and didn’t take our order for 20 minutes (even though she knew we were ready). Wings (ordered right when we arrived) took 25 minutes. Salad ordered with one of the burgers came before the appetizer. She was just running around everywhere while we watched everyone’s food (including our bone dry wings) sit on the kitchen shelf under the heat lamp, waiting to get delivered to the tables. And it’s not like it was super busy.
Anyways…I’ll probably go back because my Mom (who was with us) said it’s not usually like that, but I was NOT impressed.

Let me just say, from past experience I am not a fan. I’ve yet to have good service here and usually stay far, far away. However my sister enjoys the wings and since it was a late birthday dinner for her we went there tonight.
Woodbury on a Saturday night anywhere is busy and it was here, ½ hour wait for a table, no problem but we had a 16 month old with and asked if we could wait outside. We were given the electronic little thing and out we went. After 20 minutes or so we came back in to the entry area, after a few minutes there I watched as they sat people that had arrived after us, so we check with the hostess and she says… «Oh, I thought you guys were leaving» … Are you kidding me?!? Yeah and we were just gonna take this little notification thing with us as a souvenir!!!
So get a table, get drinks, get the orders in, all just fine. Even got some milk for the baby. Good… All total for the table we had a well done garlic burger, a chicken sandwich, wings, and beef tips.
Between my sister and the baby deciding he wants to drink from a straw, her drink was gone pretty quick after we ordered, yet she wasn’t offered a refill for like 10+ minutes. That was the one and only time our waitress checked on us between ordering and when our food came about 45 minutes after we ordered. Seriously 45 minutes! And to top it off my chicken fresco sandwich was missing components. I flagged down someone to grab our server and she fixed the issue straight away but then vanished once again. About the time we were done eating she was back to refill the drinks… Only the second time in well over an hour.
The food was good, we ate it all, standard everyday bar/​grill type food. The beef tips were a surprise hit.
Between the lack of service and the crazy long wait for food, I would NOT recommend, especially if dinning with children. Since the food wasn’t too bad once we actually received it, that’s the only reason I’m giving them two stars instead of one.

Awesome service and awesome food. Great prices too. Highly recommend the garlic burger, or this huge burger (pictured) that my boyfriend got. We loved it!

It’s a bar and grill, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a bar and grill.
Me and some folks stopped in for a weeknight dinner, and we had made a reservation, but we didn’t need it. There was plenty of room. The parking lot looked like there should be an hour wait, but I guess everyone was at happy hour.
They did seem to have some decent happy hour specials, though. Their claim to fame is apparently their wings. We had some, and they were good. They weren’t amazing. I don’t like wings that leave the little wingy tip on them. It’s weird and you can’t get your face in there without getting sauce on your ear. The sauces were good.
Other things at the table… a chopped salad which got top marks. A fairly good pizza. Some tasty burgers. A chicken sandwich that was fine, but the onion mayo was great, and even better on top of A++ tater tots. Yes, that’s right, the tots were the best thing on the table. That’s not hatin’, that’s a compliment. Most people don’t do tots very well.
I did find it weird that whilst explaining the many things that were made from scratch, the server (who was super nice) mentioned something about the owner’s mom mixing some dressing or sauce in her HOME, and then bringing it back to the restaurant. Cool, and nothing against your mom, but does the health department audit your mom’s house?
It was certainly a fine experience. I’m not going to go out of my way to go again, but I’d be happy to eat here again.

My wife and I went here a few years ago with some friends. The service was so bad that we collectively decided to not leave a tip (a huge thing for us as we are great tippers). The next day I noticed a charge on my credit card that was a few dollars over what we had paid the night before. I checked with a friend who was there with us and she had the same thing. The server had added a tip for herself. Went to the restaurant to complain and all we got was «sorry» from the GM.
Tonight we decided to give them another chance. BIG MISTAKE. After 10 minutes we received cokes. Had to yell after our server as she almost ran away to give her our appetizer order. Apps came out and we finished them before our server came to take our dinner order. No refills in that time. Then the 45 minute wait for our food. Before she could bring it out we told our server we wanted the check and were going elsewhere. She said she’d get the manager. Manager shows up with our food a few minutes later and I told her we didn’t want it, just the check, we’re leaving. She came back with the check, set it on the table and said «sorry» and left. Thought the first bad experience was possibly a fluke but not after tonight. Just terrible all around. Never again.

We have been here 5 or 6 times since it became Ray J’s and the food and service have ranged from bad to great. Our most recent trip was easily the worst which sucked because we brought guests with us this time.
The good stuff: The wings (whole wings) are excellent, the drinks are fast and moderately priced and the pizzas are usually very good. We have also had some very good food on many occasions.
However, there is almost ALWAYS one dish we get that sucks and on the last visit half of the table thought their food was awful, a club sandwich tasted spoiled, the hot turkey sandwich was awful and the Chili Rubbed Shrimp were rubbery and tasteless. On a previous trip I tried the brisket special and it was very fatty and not very smokey — it was more like crock pot roast beef.
Worst of all, the service we received on that occasion was completely unacceptable: slow, uniformed, inattentive and she just seemed completely disinterested. We waited 40 minutes to get our food and there were only 3 other tables of people in the restaurant (Saturday afternoon). The waitress explained the wait on the fact that she wanted to give us time to finish our appetizers. Right. We had a 4 year old in our group so we clearly were not there to drink and socialize.
As I said, I have had some very good food here on occasion so its too bad that they are so inconsistent. I won’t be going back — if I go out locally I want to go somewhere that I know I’ll get good food almost every time.