Wawa (Wellswood)
1760 W. Hillsborough AvenueFinding something to eat late at night seems to be getting harder. Even the chain casual dining places are closing by 1 AM which made finding something to eat after our shift during the week in Tampa really hard.
I’ve never had a problem with gas station food. I get chicken from the Shell station in downtown Kalamazoo at least once a week and I love the pizza from the Speedy Cafe’s.
We kind of slummed dinner on Wednesday night and had Subway. We didn’t have a lot of time and that was something quick and easy. It’s not really filling though and by the time we started heading back to the hotel at 1 AM, I was hungry and needed something to eat before I went to bed.
I stopped at a Wawa on Tuesday night to grab some drinks for the morning. I had heard of Wawa but had never actually been in one. I wasn’t hungry Tuesday night so I got my drinks and that was it but I noticed they had a food option similar in style to Speedway’s Speedy Cafe. We had to pass that Wawa again on Wednesday night so I stopped again but this time added some food to my drink purchase.
We stopped at the Wawa on West Hillsborough Street near Mendenhall Drive in the Wellswood area of Tampa. The gas station/convenience store is really large and is a really popular stop even after midnight.
The fresh food section of Wawa is in the middle of the store. It’s kind of a circular counter that wraps around the food prep area. There are menus and advertisements for different sandwich’s and snacks all over the store.
The ordering is just like the Speedy Cafe’s we have around here. There is a touch screen monitor that makes finding what you want and customizing very easy. Once you place the order, you are given a ticket to take to the main cashier. Once paid, the order is put together and placed on the counter with a corresponding number for pick up.
I ordered a cheesesteak and a bowl of Buffalo mac and cheese. I grabbed both from the counter after paying for the food and a couple of Pepsi’s then we headed back out to our hotel in Wesley Chapel to call it a night.
I popped open the Buffalo Mac & Cheese first. The base for this side is a pretty classic and very cheesy Mac & Cheese. Wawa has a few different flavor options for the Mac & Cheese and they are all achieved by adding flavoring to the base. In this case, the Buffalo sauce was just sitting on top of a standard Mac & Cheese order. I took my plastic fork and mixed it in. The Buffalo sauce was probably about a medium on the Buffalo scale. Honestly, the Mac & Cheese was pretty good on it’s own. The Buffalo sauce just added a little bit of a kick to the thick, creamy cheese sauce.
I did a Custom Cheesesteak off of the Hot Hoagies section of the menu. I kept it fairly simple with the meat, cheese, and added jalapeno peppers. The sandwich was quite large, longer than it was wide. The bread was a pretty dense French roll that was stuffed to the point of falling apart with sliced steak. The cheese was between the bread and the meat which made it less messy. The jalapeno slices added a little bit of heat and a little bit of flavor to a somewhat bland sandwich. It wasn’t that the sandwich was bad, it just needs something to give it a little pop and there are plenty of customization options to do just that.
For what it is, I actually really liked my firsts Wawa experience. There are 900 Wawa stores nationwide but they’re all on the East Coast…nothing really close to Southwest Michigan. The food was very filling, it was open late at night, and the entire meal only cost me about $15 (with a couple of Pepsi Zeros). Good, quick options can be hard to come by sometimes and Wawa delivers on that.
SW Michigan Dining 