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Wright's Farm Restaurant, located in Harrisville, Rhode Island, is a home-style, all-you-can eat chicken restaurant and is open year round, but is only open Thursday - Sunday. The menu contains only two menu items: Chicken Dinner and Steak. Adult dinners are $11.75 per person, children’s meals, ages 2 – 10, are $6.75 per person, and children under 2 are free. The chicken dinner is standard for everyone, salad, rolls & butter, shells and red sauce, hand cut hom-made French fries and chicken. The steak dinner is a 16 oz sirloin for $20.00 – the steak itself is not all you can eat – but all of the other sides are all you-can-eat. To make a reservation, you need a minimum of 10 people and, if only 9 in your party show up, you would have to wait your turn to be seated with the rest of the customers who did not have reservations. I’ve heard the wait can get long. So we made reservations for 18 people at 4pm for the Friday after Christmas.
a peek into the dining room
We arrived about 15 minutes early to a very large, nearly empty parking lot. We entered through the gift shop entrance, went through the waiting area up to the host, and gave our party name to the maitre’d. We let him know that one car in our party would be arriving a bit late. He said that was not a problem, told us that our table would still be available but that we could only be seated once the whole party arrived. He showed us the lounge area that we could wait in or that we could visit the gift shop while we wait for the rest of the group. The lounge area was large with only one couple sitting at a very long bar having a drink; and, at several tables in the lounge, people were waiting - possibly for the rest of their party to arrive - because the doors had just opened at 4pm and there was plenty of available seating.
We decided to go into the gift shop and browse. The gift shop is big with lots of nooks and crannies filled with a huge selection of items! Christmas decorations just happened to be 50% off when we went! A huge selection of Fudge made on right on the premises, all sorts of candy - including old-school candy, you could purchase frozen chicken pies, they sell jewelry, purses, sports paraphernalia, nick-knacks, children's toys, novelty toys, stuffed animals, books, so much stuff you could spend several hours just looking! We glanced up and noticed the rest of our party had arrived. It was difficult tearing ourselves away from the gift shop – we were having so much fun and hadn’t gotten a chance to see everything in the store!
We approached the maitre’d to inform him we had all arrived and were seated immediately - towards the back of the restaurant. We told them when we made the reservation that we had about 6 children, so we were seated just outside of the main area. It worked out well - the children were able to get out of their seats stretch their legs and not disrupt anyone in the restaurant. The dining room was large, clean, well lit and nicely done. Our rectangular tables were set side by side in two rows, and each row had its own waiter. We were welcomed quickly and the drink order was taken first - drinks are not included in the price of the meal. Soda can be purchased by the pitcher, by the glass or a beverage can be ordered from the bar. Our salad and rolls arrived at the same time the drinks did. The salad was nothing fancy, just a regular garden salad with Wright's Farm dressing and came with lots of rolls and butter - and so far, it was all good. We had anticipated that all of the food items would be brought to our tables at the same time as the salad and rolls, but the waiters stood by our tables, and offered us more salad and rolls. I admit that I was a little disappointed because I thought that everything was going to be brought out to us all at once and that empty bowls would be refilled as soon as they were empty, but it soon turned around quickly. When everyone had their fill of salad and rolls, the rest of the meal was put out on the table all at once, baby shells in red sauce - (no meat in the sauce but plenty of thick red sauce that clung to the pasta just right - and cheese to sprinkle over it), French fries, and chicken.
I reached for the French fries first. The French Fries were like none I had ever tasted before. Homemade from a white Russet potato, fried to a dark golden crispy outside and soft on the inside with an indistinguishable sweet flavor. The malted vinegar, used in place of ketchup, finished the fries off! Next, the chicken - it was cooked golden to medium dark brown in color and looked moist, tender and scrumptious! My first bite was of a piece of the skin – (admittedly, it’s my favorite part of the chicken!). Immediately I thought, "Uh Oh, this is too salty", but the meat itself was not salty at all - it was only the skin that was salty from the spices that the chicken marinated in and then gets baked. The meat was very moist and delicious, not greasy at all! I really loved the flavor and texture chicken. It was prepared in quarters - the leg and thigh together and the breast and wing together. During the 1 hour and 15 minutes that we spend eating dinner, our waiters stood by our table the whole time just waiting to serve us more, and we did eat. . .
Once we ate our fill of the meal, one person ordered dessert - my 3 year old granddaughter, Lexi. It was a slice of ice cream roll, and it had crunchy chocolate bits surrounding the outside of the roll of vanilla ice cream with chocolate ice cream in the center of the roll, shaped as . . . you guessed it, shaped as a chicken! The restaurant offers only ice cream for dessert at a reasonable cost of $1.00.
Everyone in our group really enjoyed the Wright's Farm Restaurant and we all plan to go back again sometime in the future. I think it might become a tradition.
PS - just to let you know how busy it is on a Friday, when we arrived in the large parking lot at 3:45 pm- it was mostly empty - at 5:30 when we left - the parking lot was so full that cars were driving around waiting for people to pull out of spaces so they could park. The restaurant was completely full and the waiting area was packed. It is a must to put on your bucket list if you have not been there yet!
Kathy Bateman, Pathology
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Incidentally, I have it on good authority that Kathy makes a mean batch of brownies, too. And yes, you read that right: this is a review from over the Winter holidays. Now that we've got our new blog up and running, we're looking for more. If you'd like to share with SHARE a restaurant review (or a book review, or a movie review, or a roller-coaster review, or other idea) please send it to kirk.davis@theshareunion.org. (I'm also on the hunt for other food-related writing from SHARE members . . . for example: recipes, holiday meal remembrances, brown-bag lunch tips, notes on recent nutrition research--and, especially--fun tales of kitchen disaster. Thanks!)
