Wawa Hot Turkey and Stuffing Bowl
It’s decent food… but fails to reach it’s potential due to service problems.
When I was a kid growing up in Connecticut, I would occasionally see these stores named “Wawa” but at some point they all disappeared. Wikipedia says the company abandoned most of the New York Metro area and New England because it was too competitive. Wawa stores remain in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. It’s a basic convenience store, similar to 7-11, and most newer locations also sell gas. For me, what makes Wawa great are their delicious hoagies.
There’s a self-service touch-screen ordering menu in each store where you can order hoagies, soups and more. The chicken salad hoagie with extra provolone cheese is my standard choice, and I would pick it over Subway or Quiznos any day. For the amount of meat they pile on, and the price, those other chains don’t compare.
I’d never eaten other items from the hoagie shop, but recently a billboard for their Hot Turkey and Stuffing Bowl got my attention. I hoped their bowls would be just as good as their hoagies, and since Thanksgiving is right around the corner, it might help me get into the holiday spirit. After trying it twice, it appears my order was incorrectly made both times. According to the WAWA website I should have received hot turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. When ordering the first time, there was no stuffing in my bowl. I’m not sure why… maybe they ran out. For that matter it was NOT an option on the menu screen. They did offer cranberry sauce, which I decided to add.
So I got my first bowl and was quite excited. It felt pretty hefty, though I suspected it was probably just mashed potatoes weighing it down. When I opened the container and got a whiff, for some reason my first thought was cat food. After a few seconds, and to my relief, I was getting a familiar aroma of turkey and gravy. There was a lot of gravy, so much I worried it was going to spill. As I thought, the majority of the bowl was mashed potatoes. Thick sliced turkey was sitting on top, with a small amount of cranberry sauce finishing it off. When I finally jumped in, I devoured everything pretty quickly. The potatoes and gravy were great, but the turkey didn’t stand out. If I took a piece of turkey alone, I could taste it, however it wasn’t very flavorful. If I took an entire forkful of different ingredients, the turkey flavor got lost completely. There wasn’t much cranberry sauce but it was strong and tasted great. I kept thinking it would have been better with stuffing, and how it should be mandatory in a Thanksgiving Bowl.
On my visit to another WAWA location, I discovered they had stuffing available there. Problem solved, right? Not exactly. This time, I received NO turkey and NO gravy. Yeah that’s right, my second bowl was just stuffing, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes. Maybe something went wrong with the automated ordering process, or maybe since it was 11:30 at night the person preparing it just wasn’t in the mood to do it correctly. Whatever the reason, it was very disappointing to see no turkey in my Hot Turkey Bowl. I didn’t want to waste my $3.17 and didn’t feel like driving back, so I dove in. It was actually not too bad. The stuffing was very tasty and just moist enough. The mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce tasted just like the first location. Even though it was incomplete and made incorrectly, I still enjoyed what was given to me.
This was a tough review for me to grade. Despite the lack of stuffing in the first bowl, and lack of turkey in the second, I still enjoyed both. They’re not in the same league as the excellent hoagies, but they’re good. If I had received all of the correct ingredients, I would probably be giving the Hot Turkey Bowl a score of B, but with errors on both visits and turkey taking a backseat to other ingredients, a C- feels appropriate.
Trying something new and different from the Wawa sandwich counter was a decent overall experience, but I think I’ll be sticking with the hoagies in the future. They actually offer this bowl in hoagie sandwich form, so maybe I will try that next. At the very least, eating two of these bowls from Wawa has gotten me excited for the real Thanksgiving meal that’s coming soon, and I know my mother and sister will prepare it right!
Price: $3.17 / Website: Wawa.com
Fast Food Critic Score: C-
Click here for rating system details.
Nutrition Facts - Wawa, Hot Turkey and Stuffing Bowl.
Calories - 871
Calories from Fat - 414
Total Fat - 46 grams
Carbs - 78 grams
Saturated Fat - 16 grams
Trans Fat - 0 grams
Cholesterol - 51 milligrams
Sodium - 2783 milligrams
Protein - 37 grams
You should order it a third time just to see what they put in it this time, maybe no turkey or mashed but you do get frog legs and spanish onions.
That thing just looks disgusting..
Yuck!!
Inconsistency amongst chain stores is such a disappointment. Sounds like you were rather generous with the score. Oy, 46 g of fat and 3 g of salt, too.
I agree it has potential.
What they should do is make the bottom split in half, 50% potatoes one side, and 50% stuffing the other side. Then cover both with the turkey and gravy.
Wow… that looks awful… like barf.
A turkey bowl with no turkey and it gets a passing grade just below average? What would it have to be like to get a “D” or “F”?
Old Geezer,
for it to have received a D or an F, the taste of both experiences would have been awful.
From my review:
Despite the lack of stuffing in the first bowl, and lack of turkey in the second, I still enjoyed both. They’re not in the same league as the excellent hoagies, but they’re good. If I had received all of the correct ingredients, I would probably be giving the Hot Turkey Bowl a score of B.
Keith… yeah, it didn’t smell great at first, but the taste wasn’t too bad!
I understand Old Geezer’s point, but I think it’s a fair score because it’s safe to assume the second bowl with no turkey was a mistake or exception. Obviously they don’t serve them that way regularly, and it’s not their intentions to.
They deserve to be penalized for the mistake, and they were, but it would seem overly harsh to fail a product completely based on that incident when he seemed to enjoy the food in general. C- is not a very good score, but at least it shows a sign of hope. That’s how I interpreted the review.
If there was a turd in it, it would have gotten a D+.
Looks bad, bad bad…..Decent concept, but why do that to yourself????? If the fresh sandwiches are decent, I would stop and try.
I’m surprised you’d eat that.
Looks disgusting and they messed up your order!
Hello everyone.
We appreciate and respect the feedback, and we take it seriously. I’ve attempted to address the point raised by our friend Old Geezer below.
—————————-
If reviews were based solely on service and consistency, this would score a D/F.
However, they are not.
That would give no consideration to the food itself.
We try to include a bit of everything in our reviews, from company history to details about our dining experience, but ultimately it boils down to whether the food tastes good or bad. And in this case, it did not taste “bad”. John enjoyed the food. Granted, the service was bad. No argument there.
Maybe we could expand our reviews to include a separate, second score, that would focus on service. For example, we could say that… TacoFarm has A+ tacos but their service sucks and gets a F score.
My only fear with trying to do that — Reviewing fast-food is tough enough with chains having 100’s or 1000’s of locations. If you add customer service, computers and human beings into the mix, things get even more complicated to judge. It’s easier to produce (reproduce, mass produce) consistent food across the board, than to ensure consistently good service at each of the locations.
For the most part, a hamburger from McDonald’s in Texas will taste the same as a hamburger from McDonald’s in California, New York, or Washington. But there will probably be a more significant difference in the service, consistency and quality of employee, between those individual locations. For that matter, between different locations within the same state, city or town.
I hope that made sense. John said it was tough to grade a situation like this, and I’ve got to agree with him. I’m sure glad this wasn’t my assignment.
That bowl looks a mess but it’s what my Thanksgiving day plate looks like after I go back for second helpings and the food gets all mixed up together.
It doesn’t bother me. I would try this assuming it had the stuffing.
Hey Tim,
I agree with you, I don’t think you’d have to make a second score, its understandable and they did lose a mark.
In the end, we all just want to find something decent to eat
Tim,
I agree you shouldn’t introduce a second score. But here’s the thing. John tried to get what was offered twice. Each time he got something different from (and less than) what was offered. It would be like going to Taco Bell and ordering a burrito, but getting a taco. “Oh well, close enough. There were some of the same ingredients and they tasted pretty good!”
The third word in your blog’s name is “Critic.” If a reviewer orders something twice and doesn’t get it either time, then that is not an “Average” food experience. I don’t know how many times you have to try to get what you ask for, but once should be a pretty good number, don’tcha think? Beyond that it should be, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Nothing causes controversy like pictures that look like…. I don’t know what.
This thing looks really repulsive, even if it actually tastes O K
never had that bowl but the wawa hot turkey sandwich is perfection…roast turkey, gravy and melted american cheese on a toasted roll…you’ll need a stack of napkins, but i’ve driven 20 minutes to get one.
That looks like the worst thing I have ever seen on the internet ever.
and I’ve seen some terrible things.
that is one ugly dish to have to look at everytime I click on fast food critic
David R, good call on the 50/50 split idea. Looking at the official Wawa website it looks like its supposed to have half potatoes and half stuffing on the bottom.
http://www.wawa.com/WawaWeb/Turkey.aspx
I hate the look of this bowl so much I felt the need to leave another comment expressing that fact.
Not the most appetising thing I’ve ever seen.
OMG!!!! These bowls are AWESOME! I make sure to get em at least a few times between thanksgiving and January!
FIrst of all you got a crappy wawa…no biggie , it happens. Second, you should try it with ALL ingredients. It is WONDERFUL!!!!! Maybe I’m just not a picky eater, but I love me some WAWA!