Buffalo Wagon – Colonie, NY

One thing I like about the capital region of NY is the abundance of Asian restaurants. I personally prefer the Asian styles of cooking and flavors over Italian food. I can eat an entire quart of roast pork lo mein and can hardly stomach two ounces of spaghetti with meatballs. I know this makes me a bad Italian, but aren’t I American anyway?

Buffalo wagon (located just off Wolf Road behind Ray Romano’s Macaroni Grill) is a place that I go to when I want to eat in a restaurant with food a step above standard Chinese takeout. I have participated in a #MissionSushiTour stop with Cute~Ella at Buffalo Wagon. In my review, I mentioned starting a Mission: Duck tour with Buffalo Wagon being the first stop. This was a tongue-in-cheek comment, but you can consider this review the first stop on the #MissionDuckTour, because it pretty much was.

My buddies, Rory, Brian G. and Nasty Nick, and I gathered for dinner at Buffalo Wagon. Rory and I didn’t have to look at the menu. We knew we were splitting the Peking Duck (2 ways). At first, I asked the waiter how many people that dish would serve, which the waiter interpreted as me ordering the dish. That language barrier started things off on the wrong foot, so I calmy corrected him. Our other company took a few minutes to decide on what to order, but we eventually placed our order, and Rory and I did order the Peking Duck (2 ways).

About 15 minutes later, a lady rushes out of the kitchen holding this in all of it’s ducky glory:

It was at that moment when we knew we made the right choice.

A few minutes after that, the waiter came out with a tray full of goodies to start concoting our dish. On the tray were thin slices of duck breast, hoisin sauce, julienned scallions and cucumbers, and “steamed pancakes” (which were basically flour tortillas).

I liked that they did this table-side, but it got a little frustrating when, every minute, to either answer the phone or look if tables needed to be seated, the server would just leave our food sitting there, and a different server would come take over. What made this more frustrating was that our table was one of 3 tables over the course of the entire evening; they could have dedicated their undivided attention to serving us warm duck. Regardless, they finally finished our Peking duck pancake meal and left us with a mound of these things.

Rory and I started devouring this and then another couple of plates came out. One contained nicely formed cups of iceberg lettuce; the other contained chopped Peking Duck with vegetables and pine nuts.

The goal was to eat the meat mixture in the lettuce wrap, nothing overly complicated.

All in all, I was pleased with this meal. For $38, it was an insane amount of food. We split it only two ways, but Rory commented that the amount of food we had was probably good for four. I’d argue that that’s slightly pushing it; it was a great size for 2-3 people. I really liked the pancake tortilla concoction. The crunch of the scallion, cucumber, and duck skin was a great counterpoint with the pancakes and hoisin sauce; the sauce also offered great sweet and salty flavors. I wasn’t too much of a fan of the chopped duck dish. I thought it lacked seasoning and was a little too spongy (I’m not sure of it, but I think the gizzards were chopped into it). My comment was that if you add some hoisin to this dish, it would probably be better, and Rory did actually order some extra hoisin and verified this comment.

Having dined at Buffalo Wagon multiple times, and trying all different dishes from dim sum to classic takeout dishes to sushi to the peking duck, I’d say this was my best experience so far, and if you like duck, I would highly recommend to try it! The service does leave much to be desired, but, once you cross the language barrier, it isn’t so bad.

Read more “derryX Dines” HERE!!!