Wegmans
675 Alberta Drive, Amherst, NY 14226
Web: Wegmans
Phone: 716.831.6300
Rating:    [learn more]
Pros:

Offers an array of hot and cold foods that may be convenient to pick up along with shopping list items from the area's very best supermarket.

Cons:

Quality of foods ranges from okay to seriously terrible, with sushi at the bottom of the barrel, nearly dog food quality. Barely worth the $7 per pound hot item price or the very high sushi prices.

See More Restaurant Reviews For:
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"The $16 'Wegman's Special Combo' we bought was so far from good that we decided to let our dogs finish eating it; in truth, even they have tasted better sushi than this."

As much we love Wegmans as a supermarket - and we do - we really don't like it as a place to eat or take out meals. Walk into certain locations and you'll initially be amazed to find several sushi chefs, Chinese, chicken wing, and salad bars, pizza and submarine sandwich shops, and if you're really lucky, a Charlie the Butcher Express location - plus a second floor devoted to seating. But then you'll try the food, and depending on what you order, you could either wind up two-star pleased or zero-star nauseated.

Let's start with the sushi. To describe it merely as "terrible" would be an oversimplification, as stripped of important nuance as the items themselves. It would be more appropriate to say that what Wegmans serves as sushi is less authentic than the plastic sushi models famously sold in Kappabashi, Japan. Despite their appearance, the nigiri, maki, and temaki so barely resemble the real things in taste, temperature, and texture that we would warn people away from eating them - especially given that you'd pay the same or lower prices at actual Japanese restaurants.

Granted, there may be times when these pieces of rice and fish are not as awful as they taste after being placed inside the display refrigerator, sitting for hours under woefully outdated "Discover the Orient" signs as a trophy to the utter destruction of sushi preparation as an art rather than a formula. And technically, what you get is edible: eel rolls ($7.49) consist of their expected ingredients, albeit so jumbled and coated in sesame seeds that they're otherwise unidentifiable. Similarly, the fish is fresh enough that we didn't get sick, despite the oozing of fluids from a Spicy Tuna hand roll set ($7.25) and the artificially-enhanced colors of otherwise utterly lifeless, dry pieces that we purchased. But even the $16 "Wegman's Special Combo" of tuna, salmon, and shrimp we bought was so far from good that we decided to let our dogs finish eating it; in truth, even they have tasted better sushi than this.

At this point, we'll acknowledge the single most obvious response one might have to these findings: "it's supermarket sushi; what did you expect?" Surprise - we've actually eaten a fair bit of sushi at supermarkets and convenience stores before. In the United States. And in Japan. There are places where people actually queue up to buy each day's refrigerated sushi as soon as it's marked down at night. Some supermarkets do a solid enough job on the initial preparation that what's left at a day's end is still pretty good for the price. At Wegmans? Not so much.

We'll interrupt the criticism for a moment to complement Wegmans on its coffee bars, which we've found to offer nice varieties of drinks at reasonable prices, as well as seating areas near newspapers. Located near enough the front doors for customers to run in for coffee and nothing else, we wouldn't go to a Wegmans just for this, but as way to start or take a break from extended shopping, it's definitely nice. It's also worth noting that at some locations, you'll find Charlie the Butcher's roast beef sandwiches alongside submarine sandwiches inspired by the locally respected DiBella's chain. These items mightn't be identical to the mouthwatering originals, but they're close enough for most people.

Unfortunately, most of the other items we've tried at Wegmans' restaurants are not as compelling. Chicken wings ($7 per pound), even the traditional Buffalo-style ones, are heat lamped, sitting in almost flavorless sauce, possessing more meat than taste. Vietnamese summer rolls ($4/2), made from softened rice paper wrapped around lettuce, shrimp, and rice noodles, were awful. In one bite, we could feel the flavorless shrimp either disintegrating or decomposing, the rice paper possessing the toughness of rubber, and something gooey in the center of the rolls oozing out as we chewed. Could it get any worse?

The Asian food bar didn't fare much better, and was limited in options. Chinese items we tried - lemon, sesame, and General Tso's chicken - were even more similar to one another than usual, all with a poor ratio of breading to overcooked meat, and their overly sweet sauces possessing only hints of their typically distinctive sour, savory, or spicy characteristics. Barbecued spare ribs were meaty, but not quite strong enough in hoisin sauce, and fried shrimp bundles were similarly visually spot-on but tasted overcooked and the opposite of delicate. The only good item in the bunch, an Indian samosa-style fried dumpling made with curried meat, was not enough to base a meal around. We've had mixed experiences with the salad bar, some decent thanks to a nice variety, and some not.

Of course, a similarly obvious response to such criticisms might be, "what would you expect from a supermarket's mini-restaurants, especially ones with buffet-style food service?" And again, the answer would be "better than this." It's not hard to find better salad bars here; there were at one point a couple of really good Chinese buffets in Western New York, too, and there are still a few fine to good Indian options, generally at prices lower than the $7 per pound Wegmans charges as a flat rate for these items. If that doesn't sound like enough of a profit margin, consider that people tend to load their dishes up with rice and noodles, which even at recently inflated pricing sell in bulk for under $1 per pound. True, we've had worse food at buffets, but not by much relative to what we've had here; we've also had much, much better meals for less.

From what we understand, Wegmans restaurants were initially designed as destination-quality venues and staffed with good local chefs - an ambitious attempt to give customers even more reason to visit already compelling markets. But today, it's obvious that these small stores-within-stores are in desperate need of improvement, possibly even substantial outsourcing. With sushi so bad that it barely deserves that name, and hot entrees that fall below even food court standards, it's hard to believe that some of these items would be acceptable to the same people who publish magazines and schedule classes on cooking. Even if such problems are easy to ignore given the size and quality of other offerings at a typical Wegmans location, discussed in Part I, they unquestionably detract from what otherwise could be a true culinary paradise, and deserve to be remedied.