Buckets Incredible Craveables (Traverse City)
3575 US-31Finally. Finally we made it to Great Wolf Lodge and L could start her birthday celebration. We were lucky enough that when we got there at 3:00. our room was ready (check-in is actually at 4:00). We headed up to the room and before I even had the bags with our swimsuits in them in the room, L had stripped down and was chomping at the bit to get her swimsuit on and to the water park.
B, on the other hand, needed a nap. J stayed in the room and took a nap with him while L and I headed down to the water park to get this party started.
J and B joined us just before 5:00 and we played for another hour. It was now 6:00 and dinner time. The kids weren’t going to last much longer so going out for dinner was out of the question. We had pizza the night before from Paesano’s, so picking up a pizza from Hungry As a Wolf didn’t seem like a good idea either. Lucky for us, Great Wolf had one more quick service option that wouldn’t tear us away from the pool.
Buckets Incredible Craveables is a concession stand inside the water park area at all of the Great Wolf Lodge Resorts. They don’t do a lot of fancy food, but they do have a large enough menu that you can eat dinner, feel satisfied, and never leave the pool area.
We got L out of the water to see what she wanted. The water park was pretty packed the weekend we were there so tables were at a premium. As J walked over to order dinner, she noticed an empty one in the corner by the bar so I grabbed our stuff and headed over there before joining her in line.
I said Buckets doesn’t really do anything fancy but I’m about to tell you about the burger I ordered and you’re going to think I’m crazy. They had a special that was flashing on one of the menu boards that I just couldn’t pass up.
Come on! I would order that anywhere I saw it. Fancy restaurant, dive bar, or, as in this case, pool side at a wolf themed resort.
The rest of our meal consisted of chicken fingers, french fries, mac & cheese and two drinks. The meal set us back a little over $36, so it’s not a cheap meal and despite what that picture above looks like, it’s not a fancy one either.
I was actually fairly impressed with my burger for what it was. The burger is frozen meat. The mac & cheese is mass produced. The bacon has been sitting cold and reheated. All that said though, it was quite tasty. The bun it was served on had absolutely no chance of surviving through the meal. The mac & cheese was awfully cheesy and just destroyed the bun. The big downside, at $10, this sandwich didn’t come with fries or chips. It was just the price of the sandwich. The sandwich is a meal in it’s own and we had extra fries on the table, but still. I always expect some kind of side with my burgers.
Both kids really took a liking to the mac and cheese. J had only ordered one to split between the two of them thinking that one of them would eat some of the chicken strips….but they didn’t. The mac & cheese the kids got was the same mac & cheese that was on my burger. It was rather large macaroni noodles covered in a yellow cheese sauce. Both kids ate it up and started to fight over it a little bit. We tried to calm them down with fries and chicken, but both wanted the pasta.
The chicken strips J ordered for herself and the kids ended up finding their way to my plate after J ate a couple. They were quite large and more than she could handle on her own. The chicken came right out of the freezer and in to the fryer. I watched it happen. With a little BBQ sauce, anything can taste better and that definitely helped with these chicken strips. They were a little on the burnt end or maybe it was just the oil used in the fryer. They were fine and most filling, but nothing to write home about.
We got one order of fries for the table and, again, most of them ended up in front of me. Like the chicken, they came right out of the freezer and in to the fryer. They are standard crinkle cut fries that could have used a little more salt. The order size, again, was larger than average but there is nothing special about the fries them self.
We were looking for a meal that wouldn’t take us away from the water for too long and that’s what we got with Buckets Incredible Craveables. This dining option at Great Wolf Lodge isn’t much more than concession food, but it does serve it’s purpose. The price was a little high for the quality of food, but the quantity more than made up for it.
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