Chicken Plus

• 930 W. Michigan Avenue
• Kalamazoo, MI 49006
• No Known Phone Number
• No Known Website
• Menu

I really like chicken wings.  I love the places that just bread and fry wings whole.  No fancy sauces.  Just wings.

We don’t really have many places like that in Kalamazoo.  I’ve found a number in Grand Rapids so I get my fix while I’m at work, but options close to home are nice too.

This past Friday, I was working at WMU.  I had a pretty long lunch break and needed to go somewhere off of our work site to eat.  For a couple of a weeks now, I’ve been passing a food truck on Michigan Avenue and since I had the time, I decided to check it out.

Chicken Plus is parked in the parking lot of Bottoms Up Snacks & Spirits on Michigan Avenue right at that weird intersection with West Lovell between Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College’s campuses.

The truck is pretty new as I’ve only seen it out there for a couple of weeks.  There’s no information about it online.  No website.  No Facebook page.  No Kalamazoo Gazette article.  It’s one of those rare places that only exist in the physical world (right now anyway).

I parked behind the truck in the Bottoms Up parking lot just before 2:30.  I was the only person at the truck so I told the guy working to give me a minute while I looked over the menu.  The menu is simple, but pretty big for a food truck.  They have an assortment of fried foods including several kinds of fish, wings, chicken strips, and a number of sides.  

The generator for the truck is right near the order window, so it’s really hard to communicate with the people inside.  I stepped up on a step stool they had near the window just so I could get a little bit closer so I could understand what was being said.  I put in an order for the 9 Piece Traditional Wing Meal which includes fries and a drink.

The guy who was actually in the truck wasn’t the cook so he had to go in to the store to find the guy that could actually make my food.  Once that was accomplished, he came back and rang me up.  The bill came out to an even $10 which I paid for with cash.  I’m not sure if they accept credit or not, but they were doing everything on an iPad which leads me to believe they do.

The good thing about this truck is that all of the food is cooked fresh.  The downside to that is chicken takes a while to cook.  I was told it would be about 15 minutes, so I just hung out on the sidewalk watching the cars go by as I waited for my food.  I half expected the food to be partially cooked then dunked back in to finish it off, but I watched the cook bread the chicken pieces before dropping them in the fryer which explains the wait time.

When my fifteen minutes were up, the cook held up a couple shaker’s of seasoning and asked if I wanted any.  I said yes to both which put an onion salt on the chicken and a seasoning salt on the fries.  The food was boxed up and bagged then handed through the window.  There’s no tables or anything nearby so I headed back to my job site and ate out of the back of my truck.

I actually started with the fries because I could eat those while driving.  They were simple, out-of-the-bag fries with the aforementioned seasoning salt.  They were a little undercooked which made them hard.  They were cooked enough to be edible….and I did eat all of them, but they could have used a couple of more minutes in the fryer.

The chicken was quite tasty.  The whole wing pieces were golden, brown, and fried perfectly.  The breading had a really great crunch but was not burnt.  There was a little bit of flavoring from the onion salt in the breading, but the chicken was so juicy that a lot of that flavor was lost in the flavor that was exploding from the meat.  Wings like this can really be hit or miss and Chicken Plus really did hit on this order.

I really wish Chicken Plus was a store with call ahead service and not a food truck.  The food is really quite delicious….as long as it’s cooked….but the time it takes is kind of detrimental to the food truck purpose.  If you like fried food…and who doesn’t…and you have a few extra minutes, I would absolutely recommend heading down to the party store parking lot and picking up some chicken….and if you have that late night craving, I’ve noticed them open late on weekends as well.