derryX Dines (and plays): Dave and Busters – Albany, NY

One night, we thought it would be fun to check out the new Dave and Busters at Crossgates Mall to play some games and hopefully eat some food. Cassie found some coupons for $10 off games if you purchase $10 worth of play, so we both got loaded up with $20 game cards.

It was only 5pm on a Saturday when we arrived, and the wait for a table was over 1 hour. I’m generally not big on waiting, but there was plenty to do there while we waited.

I was disappointed that there were no Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter machines, but, really, the games there are meant to be played as a group, and, to my knowledge, all of the games spit out various amounts of tickets that can be used to trade in for stuff. As far as I know, there aren’t any MK or SF machines giving out tickets. More on tickets later.

The Monopoly game was very odd. It looks a lot like Monopoly, but the mechanics are nothing like Monopoly. If you land in jail normally, you can’t travel around the board. In this, if you roll and land on jail, you immediately get out of jail and collect a random amount of money.

We got to play a lot of games with our $40. We spent the whole hour we waited for a table and about 45 minutes after dinner. We hit the Fruit Ninja screens pretty hard; that was probably our most favorite.

When we were seated in the relatively small restaurant area, it took us a while to look over the elaborate menu. I noticed there was a Cobb salad variant called The Lawnmower that I had to try.

The description of the Lawnmower was entertaining:

Life is random and wild and a bit crazy at times and, really, isn’t that what makes it exciting? Our Lawnmower salad is layered using fresh romaine and green leaf lettuces, grilled chicken, diced garden vegetables, boiled eggs, bacon bits and bleu cheese crumbles. Served with your choice of dressing.

It seemed to have all of the elements of a Cobb Salad, but didn’t advertise itself as such. For $12 bucks, I wanted to see how big it was.

It was absolutely humongous! The platter was just about as wide as the two-top table we had. The salad hit all of the elements of the EAT COBB acronym (egg, avocado, tomato, chicken, onion, bacon, blue cheese) and also had green peppers, cucumbers, and diced radish. The greens weren’t tossed in any dressing, and the overwhelmed waitstaff had forgotten my (honey mustard) dressing at first, and, when I realized and said something, I ended up with two cups of it.

To further fulfill my urge to be a little kid, I wanted chicken fingers and fries, on the menu there as “Legendary Goldfingers” (Crispy fried chicken tenders, served with seasoned french fries and chipotle honey sauce – $11.39).

I was surprised by these. The chicken tenders had an obviously hand-breaded look, and were crunchy, flavorful, and juicy. The chipotle honey dipping sauce was not particularly great. I didn’t really pick up the flavors of chipotle or honey; I mainly used my leftover honey mustard for dipping when I needed to. The fries were also nice and crunchy. They had a good dusting of seasoning.

Overall, I felt like the food was of very good quality considering it was a chain restaurant that is all about playing games.

After our meal, we went back to the games. We were having fun gathering tickets, and I had a specific goal prize in mind.

As it turns out, I ended up walking out with my arms full of prizes.

(It was weird though. When we brought our tickets to the counter, they weighed them instead of counting them. Our total wound up being an odd number, which is impossible since the value of each ticket is 2. I quickly noticed and asked how that’s possible, and the best answer that I got was that their scales are always biased in the customers’ favor because of the air conditioning blowing on the scale.)

o.O

As far as prizes, if you go enough, I’m sure you can save up enough to get a Crockpot, waffle maker, giant lollipop, Beats by Dre Studio headphones, or an iPhone.