Wyatt’s
2525 Main StreetLet’s get back to some actual restaurant blog posts, eh?
I still have a lot from our trip to Lake Placid so you aren’t safe from those yet but from here on out, it’s only going to be about food.
We were in Lake Placid for the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships at The Olympic Center. The competition didn’t start until Monday evening but L had a practice Sunday night. She doesn’t usually do practice sessions at competitions but she wanted to get a couple of skates in at the higher elevation before she started her competition on Tuesday morning.
She was done around 6:00 PM and we were all starting to get hungry again. We hadn’t eaten since we had breakfast at a Friendly’s in Liverpool, NY near Syracuse around 10:00 AM.
None of us really wanted to sit in a restaurant and eat. We were kind of looking for something quick. Not only was the ice dance competition happening at The Olympic Center but the Lake Placid Summit Classic lacrosse tournament was happening at the same time at three different sites in the area. Over 200 teams were in the area which made downtown Lake Placid incredibly busy and drove up wait times at restaurants all throughout downtown.
J and L had an idea though. They found a place last year that they knew would be pretty quick and would have something for all of us to eat.
Wyatt’s is a unique little spot in the heart of downtown Lake Placid. The tex-mex restaurant is actually a walk up window inside the Alpine Mall which is part of the Golden Arrow Lakeside Resort. You can see a window in to the kitchen for the restaurant from Main Street but you actually have to go in to the mall to find the ordering location. It looks like maybe at one time you could go to the restaurant from the street but that’s not the case anymore.
The order window is right inside the entrance to the mall. It’s on the left side of the building and it’s literally just a hole cut out of the wall with a table in front of it.
The menu is on a board between the order window and the door to the kitchen. It’s a lot of Mexican type dishes but they also have some BBQ. It’s kind of a new play on Tex-Mex where they’re offering the traditional Tex-Mex Mexican style dishes but also throwing some more Texas in there with the brisket.
Ordering is done by filling out a slip of paper. Each person gets their own slip and you just highlight what you want. We had four of us, so we grabbed four slips of paper, filled them out then took them to cash register where they were rang up. We got a brisket sandwich, a salad bowl, two beef tacos and an order of chips and queso. The cost came out to just under $50 when we added in drinks.
There’s not a lot of room to sit and eat at Wyatt’s. Since it’s all walk up window style, there is no actual seating in the restaurant. There are a couple of tables in the mall area and that’s what people were using. There’s not a lot though. We actually grabbed a rail with some seats by the pasta place that was right across the hallway.
It only took a few minutes before the kitchen started calling out our names. All of the meals were packaged and delivered one by one as they came up.
L’s came out first. She got the salad bowl which is a bed of lettuce with choice of taco toppings. She kept it pretty simple with ground beef, lettuce, cheese, and sour cream. This is like a perfect meal for her and taco salads are one of her favorite. She won’t eat beef any other time but she loves taco meat. Tacos salads like this are a great way to get protein in her because she’s not a huge meat eater. She was really hungry after the long day of travel, exploring Lake Placid and skating for the first time at the higher altitude.
B just asked for a couple of tacos. He got soft shell beef tacos and really didn’t know how to eat them. When I make him soft shell tacos at home, I roll them up like a burrito and grill the seams so nothing comes out the back while he tries to take a bite. Getting two soft shell tacos with beef, lettuce, and cheese just kind of laying on the taco sort of confused him. I showed him how to eat a soft shell taco and everything was fine. He ate almost both of them. He has a thing where he can never quite finish the last bite.
J wasn’t really hungry and just ordered herself a some chips and queso. These chips weren’t really anything special. They came out of bag and tasted like supermarket chips. The cheese was a yellow nacho cheese. Again, all fine but nothing really unique or special.
I did the Texas thing instead of the Mexican thing and ordered the Brisket Sandwich. This sandwich comes with tender, juicy slow smoked brisket served on a brioche bun. I never really thought of upstate New York as a hot bed for BBQ but there is a lot of BBQ in this town. Wyatt’s was probably the easiest place to get it because it’s just a walk up window and not a full service sit down restaurant. For what’s essentially fast food…or fast casual food…this was a pretty decent brisket sandwich. The beef was really tender, had a good bit of smokiness to it, and was full of flavor. I was a little surprised to find such a good brisket sandwich from a place that seems to be a bit more of a Mexican joint than a BBQ joint.
My sandwich came with a side of mac & cheese. It’s a pretty standard BBQ joint mac & cheese. Cavatappi noodles with a thick, cheddar cheese sauce. There’s actually a small container of BBQ sauce that comes with the sandwich. I didn’t use it on the sandwich because it was tasty on it’s own so I poured it on the mac & cheese. I really like the combination of sweet BBQ sauce with a thick, creamy cheddar cheese sauce. The mac was just alright on it’s own but adding the BBQ sauce upped the flavor quite a bit.
Wyatt’s did exactly what we needed it to do. We all found something to eat and we all left hungry.
This was a good way to start our time in Lake Placid knowing that things were going to get crazy for us over the next several days. J and L ate at Wyatt’s a couple of times last year just because it’s so convenient and the food is solid. The Mexican dishes have a bit of a food service truck quality to them but that works out just fine for my kids. They don’t like surprises. I was a little surprised at how tasty the brisket was. I wasn’t expecting that from a Tex-Mex walk up window inside a shopping plaza at a resort hotel.
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