A Burger N Wings (Portage)
273 W. Centre AvenueBoy, has it been a while since I’ve had a local blog post. I honestly haven’t been eating out much and there hasn’t been a lot of new places open recently. There have been a few and I still have a list of places I need to get to. Winter always slows me down a bit. I don’t venture out much unless I have to. I spend a lot of mine time at work outdoors so I don’t do a lot of extra trips.
I was at the K-Wings game this past Saturday at Wings Event Center. I didn’t really eat anything at the game so when I got in the car to head home, I made plans to stop somewhere along the way. I really like the 4:30 PM start times on Saturday’s because I can still find restaurants open that aren’t the Wendy’s down the street.
One of the restaurants that has been on my list for a few weeks now is a new wing place in Portage. It was a little out of the way but it was still early enough in the evening, I decided to put in an order while I was waiting to get out of WEC.
A Burger N Wings is on Centre Avenue at Shaver Road. The restaurant is in the Portage Centre Plaza shopping center on that corner. It’s in the building furthest to the south of Centre Road next to Ziki Japanese Restaurant. There is another restaurant with the same unique spelling of this name in Lansing. I assume they’re related but there’s not much info about either out there on the interwebs.
I put my meal in using their online ordering before I left the arena. As the name implies, they have burgers and wings. They also have a pretty full menu that includes Philly sandwiches, fried rice, fish dinners, shrimp dinners, and gyros. I was in a wings mood so I put in an order for 15 bone in wings and a large order of fries. The cost was right around $20.
The restaurant is pretty much what you’d expect from this kind of place. There is a counter at the back of the dining room with the large menu displayed over multiple TV screens. The lone employee asked me if I was the carry-out order as soon as I walked in the door. I said I was and he went to grab the two boxes of food which were sitting there waiting for me.
There is a small dining room with a handful of tables. The space is much nicer than you’d expect for a wing/burger joint. The floors are nicely tiled and the furniture is is more elegant than the typical metal framed, thinly padded chairs a lot of fast casual place use.
Before leaving the store, the clerk told me the fries were unseasoned but they had some seasoning at a table next to the pop machine. I popped open the Styrofoam container and added a little bit of seasoning salt before closing it back up and heading home to eat.
I started with the fries when I got home. They were simple frozen restaurant food service fries but there was a lot of them in the overflowing Styrofoam container. The addition of the seasoning helped these fries out a bit but they are what they are. They’re not bad fries but they aren’t anything special either. I probably could have gotten by with a small order. The large order was a lot but I didn’t let any of them go to waste.
I got two different sauces with the wings. The first one I got they call a dry rub. It’s garlic parmesan. The garlic and parmesan cheese is held up on the wings with a coating of butter so it’s not truly a dry rub but this is the way to make garlic parm wings. The wings are a little on the small side. Each one was about two bites worth of meat. They were really crispy wings though and the flavor was fantastic. This is what I’m looking for, flavor wise, when I order garlic parm.
The other half of the wings was Buffalo hot. Again, wings are a little on the small side but they’re really crispy even when covered in sauce. The Buffalo hot was a classic hot Buffalo sauce. They threw in a couple of containers of bleu cheese but I didn’t really need it. I used some of it just for flavor but I like hot sauce so I didn’t need it to cool down the temps.
I was really hungry when I left the hockey game and this meal did the trick. A Burger N Wings is a solid wing joint. I’ve heard good things about the burgers too and people have said the fried rice is surprisingly delicious. This isn’t an area of Portage I get to very often but there’s more worth trying here so I’m sure I’ll make a couple of more out of the way trips.
SW Michigan Dining 