You may have seen the “Sad Trombonist” ads for Wonder, which promises you can order from up to 20 restaurants at once to get what everyone wants. Wonder now has restaurant branches in New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, soon in New Hampshire  and most recently in Connecticut.

But what the heck is it?  Wonder offers the ability to order food from around 15 or so restaurants providing a variety of kinds of food and you get all of that food in a single order, pickup or delivery.

You will find a complete list of the “restaurants” they provide food from here. At any given location, they may offer some but not all of these choices, but usually around 15 of them. So you find the closest locations and place an order. In the more established locations, they offer free delivery, but in newer locations such as Connecticut, delivery hasn’t been established yet. But you can go pick up your food at any nearby location.

Connecticut Restaurants

In Connecticut, the restaurants are:

Alanza – Simple Italian, including meatballs, chicken Milanese, chicken Parmigiana, and some pasta dishes.

Alanza Pizza – A few kinds of pizza

The Mainstay (Marc Murphy) – Steaks and chicken

SriPraPhi – Thai cuisine.

Detroit Brick Pizza – a few other kinds of pizza

Bobby Flay Steak – Steaks, salmon, chicken, pork chop, branzino and salads.

Fred’s Meat and Bread – Burgers and Cheesesteak

Tejas – Texas barbecue: Brisket, pork, ribs, and smoked turkey BLT.

Walnut Lane by Jonathan Waxman – Salmon, linguini, short ribs, sea bass, shrimp, pastas.

Yasas by Michael Symon —Sandwiches, bowls, souvlaki, hummus, and so forth

Kin House – standard Chinese restaurant fare, but not as broad a selection as real Chinese restaurants.

Hanu Poke —  Salmon, tune and shrimp poke bowls

Lime Salt – Mexican style bowls, quesadilla, burrito bowls.

Wing Trip – 6, 12, 24, 36 and 48 piece wings, classic or boneless, Buffalo sauce on the side.

Room for Dessert – Cheese cake, cookies,  brownies, cupcakes and pudding.

Di Fara Pizza – Pepperoni and Sausage pizzas.

Bellies – This looks to be “kid food” like chicken tenders, kid burgers, mac and cheese.

Maydan– Middle Eastern Kebabs: chicken, shrimp, hummus.

Burger Baby – Burgers and hot dogs.

Royal Greens – Build your own bowls.

Streetbird – Chef Marcus Samuelson’s chicken sandwiches and tenders. Not much what you’d find at his actual Harlem restaurant.

Mr. D’s Fried Chicken – Mississipi style fried chicken. Buckets of 4 or 8 pieces as well as sandwiches. Plain or spicy. This menu has disappeared from Connecticut, however.

Ordering

So, we decided to try it out. Since they offered a significant discount in our first order, we decided to order a steak from Bobby Flay ($39). How could that go wrong?  We installed the app on our phone and entered the order. We could choose the degree of doneness and whether or not we wanted steak sauce (no extra charge) and one side item. We chose the truffled mashed potatoes. The Flay restaurant had some pricey salads, but that seemed excessive. Other restaurants had some cheaper salads but we skipped them this time. They said it would be ready to pick up in 18 minutes.

It took quite a bit more than 18 minutes to get to 1300 Post Rd East in Westport. That’s nearly into Fairfield: a block or two beyond the Post Plaza that used to hold a big Barnes and Noble.

When we got to that address, we found a windowless concrete-walled building with a driveway to the entrance in the back. The façade was pretty nondescript and when we walked inside, we found a rack with a couple of order bags on it, one of which was ours. But no people and no view of the kitchen. How do they prepare all that food and why can’t we watch? There are certainly no actual restaurants here, just a terminal where you could place an order and a few leaflets describing the restaurants.

We found an article in Tasting Table that explains what’s actually going on here. Almost all of the food is actually prepared in a central commissary in New Jersey and shipped to the branches for final heating “using compact, bare-minimum, ventless kitchens.” In other words, probably steamers and microwaves.

And while these “restaurants” have names, and some attached to chefs, they don’t really exist at all. They are a marketing fantasy. Let’s call them fauxRests. All the food comes from the same kitchen! And when you boil it down, you have 3 pizza fauxRests, two steak fauxRests, 3 burger fauxRests, 3 chicken fauxRests,  and four fauxRests that have succumbed to bowlification of their cuisine. And it’s not a Food Hall, like  Eataly is.

How was the food?

Actually, the steak was not bad. The steak and the potatoes came in two metal containers, and the steak sauce in a small dish. The steak was prepared with some sauteed onions and was fairly tender, although certainly no longer warm or medium rare. Steaks keep on cooking if they are hot, so they need to allow for that. Bobby Flay is a proponent of the “reverse sear” method cooking steaks, where you sear the outside and then cook the steak, sometimes just in a warm oven. They clearly didn’t do that here.

I don’t think medium rare would in general survive a delivery trip, whether by them or by me. The truffled mashed potatoes had little bits of mushrooms along with the “truffle oil,” which was surely 2,4-dithiapentane (CH3-S-CH2-S-CH3), one of many compounds found in actual truffles along with a number of others. I did find one section of that steak that was still medium rare and it was quite good.

But if you look at the menu overall, it is really pretty simplistic with only a few interesting dishes here and there. And if you just want a burger, there are lots of places that probably are just as good and probably no more expensive. I think a lot of these dishes from burgers to nicer Italian dishes would be best prepared fresh on the spot. A warmed over burger won’t cut it.

Stamford

 But, to find out for sure, we placed an order for several of those dishes in the Stamford branch of Wonder. This location is just a couple of blocks south of the Merritt Parkway on Long Ridge Rd, and located in a big block of stores with a lot of cars parked there. But, Wonder has a 5 minute pickup parking spot to go grab your food, so you may not have to hunt.

In scanning through the dishes, we found that none of the Chinese dishes were at all spicy. This means that the Hot Sour soup and General Tso’s chicken would not contain any of the usual peppers. However, in the SriPraPhai Thai section, we found that while most of the dishes were “mildly spicy,” the green curries were in fact spicy, so we ordered the Green Curry with Chicken. For comparison, we also ordered the Kin House version of General Tso’s Chicken, and for burger fans, we ordered the Bacon Stack double cheeseburger and Fred’s Fries from Fred’s Meat and Bread. For a salad, we ordered Kale, citrus and blue cheese salad from Bobby Flay.

The Stamford location is larger and considerably more welcoming than the Westport one. There are several tables where you can eat, and there is actually a counter with a staff member to help you. There is a window to the almost open kitchen so you can see what’s going on. When I was there: not a lot was going on.

Fred’s Bacon Stack Double Cheeseburger ($10.95 + $4.95)

Fred’s burger and fries came in two cardboard boxes, the burger further wrapped in aluminum foil. When we got it open, the temperature was 115˚ F, which is barely lukewarm. The fries were barely warm and lacked any crispness: they were soggy and floppy. All burgers at Wonder are cooked to Well Done, which means they aren’t particularly juicy: in fact, they are rather dry.

The burger itself was a bit more compressed than the menu picture, and the top patty was covered with several sweet pickles (rather than dill). You can order it with tomato and onion as well. It was spread with a somewhat sweet mayonnaise. Neither the burger nor the fries were particularly appetizing. If you want burgers and good fries, there is a Five Guys about two blocks north of Wonder. Go there instead.

SriPraPhai Green Curry Chicken ($17.95)

This was a great success. The chicken was fairly tender and the sauce was relatively spicy, in the American sense, nice but not overpowering. You have a choice of jasmine rice or no rice. It was white rice, still at 95˚F, but we didn’t detect much jasmine flavor. The chicken was mostly tender except for the largest piece. Overall, we enjoyed this one and ate nearly all of it.

Bobby Flay’s Citrus and Blue Cheese Salad($12.95)

You will find this salad both and Flay and under the Royal Greens salad fauxRest. It is said to consist of Kale, Romaine, orange, candied pecans, and blue cheese crumbles. Ours came with a sliced hardboiled egg as well.  The promised dressing was couple of containers of Lime-chipotle dressing. For some reason, this salad comes with a small circle of pita bread, shown in the first picture.

 While it was delivered with each component in a little piles in corners of the salad, we mixed them all together, and found it delicious. This salad is quite large and will easily feed to or three people.

Kin House General Tso’s Chicken ($16.95)

General Tso’s Chicken started out in Taiwan and got modified by Chinese chefs in New York. It is supposed to be crispy pieces of fried chicken with a sweet and spicy sauce. If you want a really good recipe for it, here is a video where Kenji Lopez-Alt makes it for you. The chefs at Wonder aren’t following it, because they leave out the Arbol peppers. The result is a sickly sweet sauce with little acidity and no spice.

They also provide tiny packets of soy sauce and some anemic sriracha, neither of which make much different. To quote Lopez-Alt this is General Tso-Tso’s chicken. It isn’t very good, as all the subtlety of the actual ingredients is lost. The chicken, as it came out of the sealed container was about 115˚F, so it had cooled way too much on the drive home or delivery. After a couple of tastes, I tossed it out.

Desserts

To complete our experiment, we felt we should order a dessert. It turns out that all the desserts in Room for Dessert are imported from other vendors, notably Junior’s Cheesecake and a number of dishes from Magnolia Bakery.  There are a number of cookies as well, and we finally settled on Chocolatier Killer Brownie ($3.95).

This is a brownie with a hard crust and really soft center. Wonder describes it as “soft and moist with a crackle top.” I would say that the middle is soft and gooey and really rich. In fact, it was so rich it sat like lead in my stomach all evening! I think I’d get a cookie or a cupcake next time, or just skip ordering dessert, and have some ice cream from my freezer. Basically all of these items are going to come in plastic packages.

Conclusions

There are a few good dishes at Wonder if you choose carefully, but a lot of them deteriorate during take-out or delivery. Wonder also offers “free” delivery from a number of local restaurants, including breakfast items, but there is no way of knowing how well they would travel. 

The dishes come sealed in containers with heavy tape that is difficult to cut, and hard to peel off without spilling the ingredients.

Overall, they are not a food hall and not a series of restaurants and a number of the recipes seemed to have been simplified or dumbed down like the Tso-Tso chicken.  If I want Chinese food, I can get it from a very nice Chinese restaurant here in Wilton, CT.  And if I want to spend $40 on a steak, I’ll go to a steak house and get it hot and the right doneness.

I had the privilege of a week long journey on the Explora I ship. Explora ships are a luxury branch of the MSC Cruise Line (Swiss/Italian). The ships are much smaller than the behemoth MSC ships, about 900 passengers, with spacious cabins, a 1.25:1 passenger/staff ratio, and all-inclusive pricing, meals, drinks and most activities. Of the six on-board restaurants, the Anthology restaurant is an exception, in that it’s 5 (or more) course meals have an up-charge of about $165 per person. This is still way less than major city dining, and since your travel agent may well have given you an on-board credit, the actual cost is much less, in my case $15. The style is fine Italian cuisine, curated by Head of Culinary, Franck Garanger.

My experience at Anthology was utterly top-notch, and I thought I’d share it with you.

When I arrived, a punch cocktail was already poured, sort of a lemon punch with gin. Bread soon arrived, along with some of the finest peppery Sicilian olive oil I’ve ever tasted, from a producer that has been in business since 1911.

The menu is divided into  5 sections with around 3 choices in each section. And note that some of the palate cleansing intermissions are included as well

After placing my order, they brought out the first amuse-bouche, a creamy, cheesy topping over a bit of diced tomatoes and other vegetables. And, a small bowl of lobster bisque with bits of several vegetables (but no lobster).

Soon, the first course arrived, shown at the top of the article, Osetra Royal caviar atop lobster and green apply, served with a sweet an sour vinaigrette. In some ways this beautiful presentation is one of things I’ll always remember from that evening.

This was soon followed by Canneloni di Capasanta, a scallop cannelloni with black truffles, herb salad and a Parmigiana Reggiano foam. I savored ever delicious bite.

The next course, Raviolo Allo Scampi was equally outstanding: Langoustine ravioli, San Marzano tomato consommé and sage butter.

Then it was time for a palate cleanser, a Granita alla Grappa. This is a premium grappa, transformed into an crystalline, icy sort of dessert.  Not to be missed!

The main course was Wagyu beef with Amarone sauce, and, amazingly chard stuffed with porcini mushrooms and s truffle potato pallet. The beef was, as you would expect, very tender and juicy and the chard quite a delicious surprise. The potato was excellent as well.

Then, as another palette cleanser, a lemon-vanille grapefruit compote with a blood orange sorbet.

And, almost finally, the dessert course: Euforia di Ciocolatto, with dark chocolate leaves made with chocolate and tofu, covering a chocolate-tofu custard, with amaretto toasted almonds.

But, wait, there are the petit fours! From the dessert cart  we picked out couple to finish with. What a spectacular evening!

The Anthology restaurants are on all of the growing line of Explora ships. I hope to run into you on one sometime soon!

Making Fried Chicken

To make good fried chicken, you need to start with small birds, weighing less than 3.5 lbs. The smaller pieces on these birds fry much better than those of the 4.5 lb behemoths, which seem to taste old and the breast meat more likely to dry out. Chicken is best when briefly marinated in salted buttermilk, for half an hour or so.

Most fried chicken emporiums cut the thighs to include the backbone ribs and then bread and fry it that way to make it look bigger. However, since there is no meat on those ribs, you just get more breading.

We visited all but two of these businesses (Popeye’s and Stop and Shop) twice to make sure we had a fair appraisal of their products.

KFC

The KFC Chicken Combo with 3 pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, a biscuit and a soda is $12.39.  The KFC original recipe chicken was warm, moist and flavorful. The flavor was enhanced by the “herbs and spices” in their breading, which while tasty, fell off the chicken onto the plate. The accompanying mashed potatoes and gravy were smooth and had an excellent flavor.

On a second visit, we just ordered a few chicken pieces and specified “extra crispy.” This was a much better choice, and the crust adhered to the chicken much better than the original recipe. The mashed potatoes were very good and the biscuit nondescript. Chicken grade: A. Oh, and one of their drinks is “lemonade.” It’s bright red and has a weird taste. Stick to the sodas.

Popeye’s

We ordered the Popeye’s 4-piece Chicken Combo (all dark meat) with mashed potatoes and Cajun gravy (very  mildly spicy). The chicken crust was crisp the the chicken meat moist and juicy. It also comes with a nondescript biscuit, for $13.69. Absolutely perfect. Grade: A.

New Canaan Chicken

The website says that their business name is New Canaan Chicken and BBQ, and much of their menu features barbecue items. But they still have fried chicken.

You get 3 pieces for $12 or 4 pieces for $14. But if you want to have it delivered, the minimum order is $15, so we ordered the tomato-mozzarella salad (1 lb is enough for 2 or 3). We ordered all dark meat, which was OK, but didn’t have much chickeny taste. Some spices in the breading would have helped. They do not offer mashed potatoes, and the French fries were tough, dry and cold. The tomato-mozzarella salad was really quite good considering they had to use winter tomatoes, but it took me scissors, pliers, and a bottle opener to open the plastic salad container. They also offered “potato cones,” but not for delivery, so we didn’t get to try them the first time.

The second time, we ordered the 3-piece dinner, but added the potato cones, which turned out to be mashed potatoes mixed with a bit of flour, breaded and fried. They are better than the French fries, but not all that tasty. The coleslaw was quite liquid and had a somewhat unusual taste. This second time, we found the chicken crust had a nice snap, but the chicken itself was rather dry. Grade: B.

Greer’s Southern Table

Greer’s Southern Table is a full service restaurant at 7 River St in Norwalk. But don’t be confused by the address. The actual entrance is around the corner in an alley across from a parking garage. There is also ample street parking in front of this side entrance. You can also try to enter from River St, but no one will notice you, since the hospitality entrance is around the corner. Greer’s does have an extensive take-out menu, and you can eat in or take out as you wish. 

They offer steaks, shrimp and grits, salmon, ribs, jambalaya, roast chicken and of course, their Buttermilk Fried Chicken. You get 4 pieces of chicken along with cornbread, and coleslaw, and one other side.  Since they don’t offer mashed potatoes, we ordered the succotash, which frankly was better than chicken. The waitress said they had baked potatoes, but she was mistaken. The on-line menu does offer Marry Me Duck Fat Potato fingerlings, which might have been fun to try.

The waitress told me you get two pieces of dark meat and two breast pieces. In fact, I got one decent drumstick, one small, juicy boneless piece of breast meat and two enormous chicken breast pieces that may have come from a young pterodactyl. They were tough and dry and I didn’t eat them. This was a Sunday night, and the B team may have been in the kitchen. Our second experience was much better.

On this second visit, we ordered the $29 Buttermilk Fried chicken dinner with cornbread and coleslaw along with the Marry Me Duck Fat Potatoes as takeout. The potatoes had a garlic flavor and were a nice addition to the meal. The crust was crispy and the 3 thighs were juicy and flavorful. The one chicken breast was fairly moist as well. BUT, they left out the cornbread and coleslaw from my take-out bag. I tried to reach someone for a comment on this, but was not successful. The chicken was absolutely outstanding: Chicken grade: A+.

Village Market

The Village Market Is a beloved specialty grocer in Wilton, CT. They are noted for their fresh meats and vegetables, their baked goods, ready to eat meals and sushi. Their deli provides meats and cheeses as well as rotisserie chickens. There is also a hot food display case where they offer freshly made fried chicken. We bought a drumstick and a thigh for $6.78. They are sold by weight, so the heavy breading is not surprising. The drumstick and the thigh weighed about the same at around 4.3 oz.

And, if you’re lucky, they also have a tray of fresh mashed potatoes you can take home warm. If the warm potatoes are gone, there are usually some mashed potatoes in the cold takeout display case that you can heat up in a microwave in a minute or two. We found that adding a dab of butter and a little salt made them quite tasty.

We found the chicken crust very substantial but snappy, and the drumsticks were good, but the thighs tended to be dry in spots. Chicken grade: A-

They usually sell out of dark meat before 4pm, so plan your shopping accordingly.

Wegman’s

Wegman’s supermarkets just recently came to Connecticut, with a relatively new store in Norwalk. It has an enormous 2-level parking garage as well as some front parking, and is open daily from 7am to midnight. The staff is plentiful and helpful in helping you find things in what is quite a sizable store. And, there are plenty of staffed checkouts as well as a self-checkout section. We are particularly partial to Wegman’s fresh bottled orange juice: far better than Tropicana, and it is the only local store that carries cultured butter.

Wegman’s has a substantial prepared food section offering all sorts of sandwiches, seafood and chicken. You can pick up hot chicken wings to eat right away, but their fried chicken pieces are in the chilled food display. They suggest you heat up the chicken for about 30 minutes in a 350˚ F oven. We tried this with a 4-piece package, but the chicken had a dry, tough crust and dry meat. The large breast piece was around 12 oz, and quite dry.

While they offered a package of mashed potatoes that looked much like the one at Village Market, it was not the same thing at all. We tried heating one of the scoops of potatoes in the microwave, but the ball deflated into a gooey pile, because it also contained cream, butter, water, roasted garlic, citric acid, carrageenan (seaweed thickener), cornstarch, cultured sugar (whatever that is: it retards spoilage) and sodium pyrophosphate. The pile of goo didn’t taste much like potatoes, and the four scoops cost $8.

Chicken: D, Potatoes: F.

Stop and Shop

We hadn’t realized until today that Stop and Shop also offers fried chicken, right next to their rotisserie chickens. There were only a few packages at 11am, but they may add more later in the day.

We bought a package of 8 pieces of fried chicken for $7.98, about half the price of the other suppliers. Surprisingly, this chicken was very good. It was warm and juicy and had a nice, crispy crust. It was actually one of the best of the fried chickens we tried. Chicken grade: A.

Conclusions

It is no big surprise that the chicken emporiums: KFC and Popeye’s make some of the best fried chicken. That is all they do and they do it very well. Typically, chicken by the piece is around $2 at these places, while Greer’s is much more expensive. Stop and Shop was a big surprise, with their excellent chicken about a dollar a piece.

Last night, A Taste of Wilton returned, sponsored by the Wilton Chamber of Commerce, with restaurants and vendors displaying their foods for tasting in the lobby of the very new Riverside apartment building at 141 Danbury Rd. (We swear it wasn’t there yesterday!)

We took quite a passel of pictures of most of the exhibits, and you can see all of them here. There was no printed program or guide and since the exhibits stretched around the outdoor pool area, it would have been easy to miss some of them if you didn’t see people carrying foods you hadn’t seen yet.

We found that there were a number of out of town vendors with really interesting offerings. The one that impressed us the most was Tucker’s Pie Company, a Bridgeport company that makes savory pies (quiches, chicken pot pie, and so forth) for pick up or delivery. They are located just off the Black Rock turnpike at 2931 Fairfield Ave.

The pie that impressed us the most was their Steak and Guinness Pie, and their Caramelized Apple and Fennel Pork Sausage Roll. You need to order a couple of days in advance, but they are worth it. If you are having a larger event, they will ship you boxed frozen pies as well.

 Two Roads brewery (from Stratford) was there with several of their beers. We tried their Summer Heaven IPA and found it delicious. Not to be outdone, the Little Pub was also offering their own branded beers.

 

 One big surprise was Mama Hu’s Baked sushi. It is basically packaged sushi you can heat and eat. We tried their spicy salmon and were quite impressed. They have commercial kitchens in Norwalk and Brooklyn, and their products are available at Village Market, Walter Stewarts and Nature’s Temptation (Ridgefield).

  

 Jacob’s Pickles (from the Sono Collection) was offering build your own chicken biscuit sliders, with some tasty looking fried chicken.

  

 

 But the culminating surprise entry was the appearance of the new Sly Bandit Brew Pub at 14 Danbury Rd. Their display was just a menu and the opportunity for them to prepare a plate for you. But imagine! A Brew pub in South Wilton and we didn’t know it had opened!

Desserts were cookies from The Painted Cookie, Banana pudding from Pressburger (who were offering full single burgers as well) and carrot cake from Marly’s.

  

You will quickly note that there were far more vendors from outside Wilton that within. Where were our favorite restaurants like Bianco Rosso, Craft 14 and Aranci 67? Not to mention Athithi, Ren Noodle and Dumpling, Cactus Rose and the Red Rooster? Well, it was a great night for those who attended, and while the Chamber said it was sold out, we think they could have sold more tickets as it was never crowded. See you there next year and at the brew pub much sooner!