Wegmans

1200 Wake Towne Dr., Raleigh  |  984-960-5600  |  wegmans.com

I first heard of Wegmans while watching the episode of The Jinx where Robert Durst gets arrested for shoplifting a sandwich from the grocery chain. The uber-wealthy alleged murderer—whose trial, coincidentally, began last week—was on a nationwide bail-jumping odyssey, had $500 in his pocket, and still felt the need to swipe a chicken salad on rye. 

Must be one hell of a sandwich, I thought.

Last September, Wegmans opened its first location in Raleigh’s Midtown to a line 3,000 people deep. (Another one, in Cary, is scheduled to open in August.) Such super-fandom, of course, was met with side-eye on the internet, but no matter. The heart wants what it wants, and the people wanted Wegmans. Six months later, they haven’t stopped wanting Wegmans. 

And I wanted to see if Wegmans could possibly live up to this much hype. 

First thing to know: The Raleigh Wegmans is massive. It’s not exactly aesthetically pleasing. It looms over a double-stacked parking deck like a suburban Kremlin. The interior is no better, a low-lit massing of browns, brownish greens, and bad fonts, like a desaturated 1980s mall food court. 

But you’re not here for the graphic design. You’re not even here for the vast grocery selection—OK, maybe you are—or the legitimately excellent cheese and charcuterie options. 

You’ve come for the staggering array of meal options and prepared foods: a sub shop, a pizza parlor, a burger joint, a bakery, a sushi counter, a labyrinthine hot bar, and a phalanx of neatly packaged ready-to-eat meals, all housed in a cavernous antechamber in the store’s northern wing. 

This is what makes Wegmans famous—and what turns millionaire (alleged!) murderers into common thieves.

I wanted to find out whether this stuff was any good. So one afternoon, my wife, Kate, and I crept through the sea of nigh-unmanageable traffic surrounding the store to try to assemble a meal from its intimidating assortment of fresh comestibles.

Loyalists speak in hushed tones of Wegmans sushi, promising quality and selection to rival any raw fish restaurant. Perhaps my first pick—a spicy scallop volcano roll—was too ambitious, because while it looked enticing, it tasted revolting. Fishy scallops piled atop unidentifiable “rolls,” the two elements joined only by a slick of pink, watery mayonnaise. The bivalves themselves had the texture of pencil erasers. It was awful.

A tray of nigiri, on the other hand, was way better than grocery store sushi has any right to be—deft slices of salmon, tuna, and yellowtail laid with care on expertly cooked rice. The fish was fresher than what you’d find at 90 percent of the Triangle’s sushi bars, and it only cost $10 for eight stout pieces.

Onward to pizza, fired in a hulking glazed-brick behemoth and laid out in the style of an NYC slice shop. The Margherita was OK—they cooked the basil with the pie, which is a great way to ruin basil. Slightly better was the cheese slice, beautifully greasy and nostalgically satisfying, a high-end version of the pizza served at the roller-rink birthday parties of my childhood.

Kate perused the hot bar’s seemingly infinite options before ladling up a tray with a weird global fusion tableau. The potstickers were unmemorable. We both enjoyed the delightfully trashy stir-fry of slippery udon and tough-yet-peppery beef, although the paneer curry was worryingly cold. 

I also hit the sub shop, which, to the employees at the checkout station, cemented my status as a glutton. “Oh, you got a sandwich, too?” a cashier asked as he rang up our hail. He looked concerned. 

He needn’t have worried. I’m a professional—a professional who now loves Wegmans sandwiches.

If anything could turn me into a Wegmans regular, it’s Danny’s Favorite, a sandwich named after—I don’t know—the kid from The Shining, maybe. It’s a piece of work, this sandwich, with spicy ham, capicola, salami, and provolone on a sub roll that glistens with its own barely contained supply of lipids. I got mine with banana peppers and brown mustard. It absolutely made my day. It made my next day, too, when I hauled the uneaten half out of the fridge and devoured it cold. 

Unctuous and processed and jammed with nitrates, this is not a good sandwich, but it is a great one.

A completist assay of Wegmans is impossible outside of a multi-volume tome, but I couldn’t make a game attempt without sampling a few more items, which took the form of some attractively jewel-boxed ready-to-eat meals brought home to the fam.

The “spicy” General Tso’s chicken was depressing, though I found its guileless idea of what the word “spicy” means to be sort of funny. I also picked up a tray of meatballs and another of ravioli, and it was here, in these “Italian-like” specialties, that I located the heart of Wegmans’ appeal.

They tasted fake, but that doesn’t mean “bad.” More like an aristocrat’s attempt to recreate the oeuvre of Chef Boyardee, drenched in sugar and sodium but innately pleasing in a lizard-brain sort of way. The meatballs—dense and humming with dried herbs—proved a big hit with our two-year-old, who solemnly declared them “very good.” (This from a kid who once described meatballs I spent an entire afternoon fussing over as “yucky.”) 

Oh, and the cannoli are amazing. Definitely pick up a box to rage-eat while trying to get out of the parking lot.

Contact contributing food editor Nick Williams at food@indyweek.com. 

Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.