Thanksgiving Dishes in Jersey City: A Friendsgiving Pizza Table

Every downtown Jersey City apartment has the same problem in late November. Somebody volunteered to host Friendsgiving, the oven is the size of a shoebox, half the group leaves for their family’s place on Wednesday, and the other half is coming straight off the PATH with no plan. If you’re searching for thanksgiving dishes jersey city hosts can actually pull off in a fourth-floor walk-up, here’s our answer: build part of the table from pizza. Let the friend with the big kitchen handle the turkey and the stuffing, and let Two Boots at 133 Newark Ave cover the main event’s Southern side, the bread basket, the vegan guests and the kids.

To be clear, Two Boots doesn’t have a Thanksgiving menu. Everything below comes off our regular menu. It’s a playbook for the days around the holiday: Friendsgiving weekends, roommate dinners and the office potluck.

Key Takeaways

• Two Boots Jersey City has no Thanksgiving menu, but the regular Cajun-Italian lineup covers a surprising number of potluck roles, from “the Southern main” to “the bread basket.”
• The Bayou Beast, Mr. Pink and The Dude form a three-pie Louisiana spread, with Hot Knots and our dippers working as the gravy boat.
• Downtown JC hosts can order ahead online and pick up on the walk from Grove Street PATH, before the holiday travel crush hits.
• For bigger groups, the Jersey City catering page handles drop-off orders with 24 to 48 hours’ notice, and holiday-week hours should be checked on our Google listing.

Check Out Our Menu!

Why Pizza Belongs on a Jersey City Thanksgiving Table

Thanksgiving in downtown JC rarely looks like the magazine version. The guest list is roommates, coworkers from across the river and whoever couldn’t get a flight home. Kitchens are galley-sized, so the old potluck rule matters more than ever: assign roles, or you end up with four desserts and no main.

Pizza fits that setup. A pie box survives the walk up Newark Ave and three flights of stairs better than a foil-topped casserole. It arrives already portioned, so nobody hovers over a cutting board. One order can hold a meat pie, a veggie pie and a vegan pie made with Daiya. And it frees the host’s tiny oven for the one dish that has to be homemade.

Then there’s the Louisiana part. Cajun and Creole flavors show up on plenty of Southern holiday tables, and our crisp cornmeal crust has a cornbread-adjacent crunch. Two Boots was founded on Avenue A in 1987 on exactly this Italy-meets-Louisiana idea, so a Cajun pie at Thanksgiving is the menu doing what it always does.

Thanksgiving Dishes Jersey City Style: Casting the Pizza Table

Think of a Friendsgiving table as a cast list. Every classic dish has a role, and something on our menu can play it.

Classic Thanksgiving role	Two Boots stand-in	Why it works
The Southern main	The Bayou Beast (marked spicy)	Spiced shrimp, crawfish, andouille, jalapeños and mozzarella: a Louisiana plate in pie form
The second main	Mr. Pink	Creole chicken, plum tomatoes, fresh garlic and mozzarella, familiar enough for cautious eaters
The hearty, everybody-goes-back-for-seconds dish	The Dude	Our Cajun bacon cheeseburger pie: ground beef and andouille, tasso ham, cheddar and mozzarella
The bread basket	Garlic Knots (3)	The rolls slot, sold in threes so they’re easy to multiply
The bread basket with attitude	Hot Knots (3, marked spicy)	Knots doused in jalapeño pesto
The gravy boat	Dippers: Cajun Ranch, Blue Cheese, Marinara, Jalapeño Pesto, Sweet Red Pepper Pesto, Basil Pesto	Pour, dunk, repeat
The stuffing slot	Tony Clifton or The Buckminster	Savory and herby: wild mushrooms and vidalia onions, or spinach and roasted garlic under top-sauce marinara
The green dish	Caesar Salad, House Salad or Larry Tate	Something fresh to cut through the richer pies
The passed appetizer	Chicken Parm, Meatball Parm or Eggplant Parm sliders	Served on house-made garlic knots, eaten standing up
Dessert backup	House-baked chocolate chip cookie	For when the homemade pie runs short

The Cajun-Italian “two boots” spread

If you take one idea from this post, take this one: order The Bayou Beast, Mr. Pink and The Dude together. Mr. Pink is the gentle on-ramp, Creole chicken on a red pie. The Dude is the one the friend who “doesn’t like fancy pizza” quietly finishes. The Bayou Beast is the main event, with crawfish and andouille bringing Louisiana character to a table that might otherwise be all beige.

Put those three in the middle of the table, set out a row of dippers, and the “is there gravy?” question answers itself. Cajun Ranch with The Dude is a strong move, Blue Cheese sits well next to the Hot Knots, and Marinara is the safe bet for dunking a plain knot. Order more cups than you think you need; they end up on everything, including the mashed potatoes somebody else brought.

Feeding a Mixed Downtown JC Crowd

A downtown JC guest list usually includes a vegan roommate, a vegetarian coworker, a friend who eats anything and somebody’s kid who only eats cheese. Here’s how to cover everyone.

Meat eaters. The two boots spread above has them handled. If you want a fourth pie, Cleopatra Jones (sweet Italian sausage, roasted peppers, red onions) leans Italian rather than Cajun.

Vegetarians. Tony Clifton and The Buckminster double as the stuffing slot. Grandma Bess, with organic San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil and Parmigiano on a thin, square Sicilian crust, is the elegant option for the end of the table where people are actually talking.

Vegans. Our vegan lineup isn’t a single sad option. Vegan Mr. Pink puts vegan chicken in the Creole lane, so your plant-based guests get their own version of the main. Earth Mother skips cheese entirely, and V for Vegan, Super Vegan, Vegan Cleo, The VCBGB, Vegan Tony Clifton and Vegan Larry Tate round out the bench. The Vegan Calzone (made with Daiya) is a sturdy extra.

Kids. Pizza Face (small only) is our kid-friendly face pie, and a plain cheese or Create Your Pizza build covers the rest of the kids’ table.

The heat-seekers and the heat-avoiders. The Bayou Beast, Hot Knots and the Jalapeño Pesto dipper are marked spicy on the menu. Mr. Pink, The Dude and plain Garlic Knots give the same flavor direction without the jalapeños, so you can seat both crowds at one table.

How Much to Order for Friendsgiving in Jersey City

Nobody wants to be the host who ran out. These rough starting points assume pizza is sharing the table with a few homemade dishes.

Group	Pies	Knots and sliders	Extras
Roommate dinner, 4 to 6 people	2 pies: Mr. Pink plus one vegan or veggie pie	A few orders of Garlic Knots	2 to 3 dippers, one salad
Small Friendsgiving, 8 to 10 people	3 pies: the full two boots spread	Knots plus one round of sliders	A dipper per person, two salads
Big apartment potluck, 12 to 15 people	4 to 5 pies, including at least one vegan	Garlic Knots and Hot Knots, two slider types	Every dipper, salads, cookies
Office potluck, 20 or more	Go through catering	Ask about knots and sliders in the package	Catering can build veg and vegan options in

Adjust up if your group skipped lunch to beat the traffic, and down if the table is already crowded with sides. A cold slice of The Dude the morning after is its own holiday ritual anyway.

Downtown Jersey City in Thanksgiving Week: The Local Playbook

Our shop sits at 133 Newark Ave, in the heart of downtown JC, and Thanksgiving week here has its own rhythm. Here’s how to work with it.

The Grove Street PATH pickup. For a lot of downtown hosts, Friendsgiving starts on a train. You leave the office in Manhattan, ride the PATH back under the river, and come up at Grove Street a few minutes’ walk from our door. Order ahead online while you’re still on the train, swing by Newark Ave on the way home and arrive at your own party with the main course already in hand. It’s the most efficient Thanksgiving errand in the city.

Beat the travel crush. The days right before Thanksgiving are when everyone with family elsewhere tries to leave at once, and trains and patience both run thin. A Friendsgiving the weekend before skips all of that. If yours is closer to the holiday, order early and leave a buffer.

Newark Ave and the brownstone blocks. The pedestrian stretch of Newark Ave is a natural meeting point. Grab the pies, meet your crew there, then walk the boxes back to whichever apartment won the hosting lottery, whether that’s a Paulus Hook rental, a Van Vorst Park brownstone floor-through or a Harsimus Cove building with a shared roof deck.

Liberty State Park the weekend before. Plenty of JC friend groups fit in a long walk at Liberty State Park the weekend before Thanksgiving, with the Manhattan skyline across the water and the cold finally settling in. It’s the kind of outing that ends with everyone hungry and nobody wanting to cook. That’s a pizza night, and a good dry run for the big one.

For a deeper look at the bread-basket side of the table, see our earlier post on garlic knots in Jersey City.

Ordering Ahead and Catering for Thanksgiving Week

Thanksgiving week is not the week to wing it. A few tips that make the pickup painless:

• Order online ahead of time. Use the Order Online button on the Two Boots Jersey City location page so your order is in before you leave work.
• Go catering for bigger groups. For office potlucks and large Friendsgivings, our Jersey City catering page offers drop-off delivery and packages by group size, with vegetarian and vegan options. Plan on 24 to 48 hours’ notice, and more is better during a holiday week.
• Check holiday-week hours. We don’t post Thanksgiving week hours on the website, so check the Two Boots Jersey City listing on Google before you plan around a pickup time.
• Bring a host gift. Two Boots gift cards are sold through Toast, and they’re a low-effort thank-you for whoever cleaned the apartment.

Pairing Pizza With What Your Guests Bring

The best potluck tables mix store-bought, ordered and homemade. Here’s how our pies play with the dishes other people usually carry in.

What a guest brings	Pair it with	Why
Roast turkey	Mr. Pink	Creole chicken keeps the poultry theme while adding seasoning
Sausage cornbread stuffing	The Bayou Beast	Andouille meets sausage, and the cornmeal crust echoes the cornbread
Mac and cheese	The Dude	Two cheesy, rich, crowd-favorite dishes on the same plate
Green bean casserole	Larry Tate or a Caesar Salad	Greens to balance the creamy dishes
Mashed potatoes and gravy	Garlic Knots and Cajun Ranch	Bread and dip, for the gravy-everything crowd
Pumpkin pie	House-baked chocolate chip cookies	A second dessert for anyone who skips pumpkin

The point is balance. If friends are bringing sides, you fill the main and bread roles. If somebody is roasting a whole bird, you cover the vegans and the kids.

Conclusion

The best dishes for a downtown JC Friendsgiving show up hot, feed everyone and don’t need a second oven. Put The Bayou Beast, Mr. Pink and The Dude in the middle, line up the dippers as your gravy boat, add knots and a vegan pie, and let your friends bring the turkey. Order from the train, pick up on Newark Ave and beat the holiday rush home. When you’re ready, head to the Two Boots Jersey City page and hit Order Online.

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