Earlier this year a restaurant opened up at the northwest corner of Central and Volutsia. Specializing in comfort foods, Fyre features such items like fried chicken, chicken fingers, wings, greens and other dishes that rotate depending on the day of the week. My friends and I stopped by the other week to give them a try and see how it compares to other options in town.
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2724 E Central Avenue
Wichita, KS 67214
316-691-9180
Closed on Monday
Tuesday – Wednesday: 8am – 3pm
Thursday – Friday: 10am – 8pm
Saturday: 11am – 9pm
Sunday: 1pm – 7pm
Cash/Card Accepted
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When we walked inside the restaurant, you could tell it’s a place that recently opened. There were roughly 4-5 four top tables with not enough chairs to fill up those tables. Seating was VERY limited. It appears that if you go here, it may be best to order it to go.
After browsing through the menu, my friends and I decided on the chicken tenders, fried chicken, chicken sandwich and the catfish filet. We all paid for our orders and then grabbed a seat.
While sitting around we noticed a couple other tables were grumbling about the long wait times for food. Afterwards, we saw the lady who took our order, whom we believed to be the owner. She was scrambling around grabbing dishes, going back into the kitchen and serving the food. She ended up telling one of the tables the other employee didn’t make it into work so she was running things all by herself. This would have been good to know before ordering our food.
Ten minutes turn into twenty minutes. Twenty minutes turned into forty minutes and it looked like our food was nowhere close to being done. There was still a whole other table yet to be served. After an hour, my friends and I contemplated saying screw it, leaving and grabbing fast food. We would have gladly taken a hit on our meal but I had a food blog to complete. Roughly 10-15 minutes later, the first of our four orders arrived. Our food would then be delivered slowly, one by one. I was the last person to receive food and by that time, two of my other friends had already finished theirs. It. Was. Brutal.
Fyre also only had one bottle of hot sauce to go around. How do you open a restaurant serving items like fried catfish and not have plenty of hot sauce to go around?
Here’s a glimmer of hope for Fyre though. By all accounts, the food was delicious. The chicken was fried properly. offering the right amount of crispness to compliment the tender, juicy chicken. The fries were well seasoned and the greens were off the charts delicious. The catfish was also cooked to perfection. Fyre had a light amount of batter on all their items as not to take away from the true feature of each dish: the meat.
Granted we felt extremely bad that it was just one person running the restaurant all to herself. But knowing people were waiting well over an hour for their food, she should have given customers that courtesy of informing them of the wait instead of continuing to take orders. I would have easily come back another time and the review could have been more positive. Had we known it would have been a near two-hour visit to Fyre, there’s no way on Earth we would have ordered there.
Despite the delicious food, it’s almost a near certainty we will never go back to dine in. If anything, we would order our food to go. With the huge number of restaurants in town, places usually get one shot to make their impression felt. Unfortunately for Fyre, wasting two hours of our lives is the lasting impression we have.
Happy Dining,
Eddy
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