Lost in Transit-lation #2: Wind Japanese & Thai
This Ontario based chain offers all you can eat Asian cuisine for lunch and dinner AND adorable robot servers
Since opening at 7566 Transit Road in Amherst last year, Wind has quickly become a household favorite for a celebratory dinner. It’s solidified a spot in our rotation thanks to a combination of a deep and varied all you can eat menu, consistent quality and adorable robot servers that our 7 year old daughter Charlie loves.
Wind Japanese & Thai is a small Canadian restaurant chain with three locations in Ontario and now with this new Amherst location, their first in the US. They offer a la carte for dining in and takeout but the real reason to go to the restaurant is for their All You Can Eat menu, offered both for lunch ($30-32 adults, $11 kids) and dinner ($41-43 adults, $16 kids). They also offer beer, wine and liquor and a solid list of alcohol free mocktails.
Once you are seated and set up with a server, you are given an iPad that allows you to order waves of dishes to your seat. You select however many dishes you’d like from the menu, add them all to your cart and notify the server to come to your table to submit the order to the kitchen. We usually go through three full rounds of ordering food before giving up.
The food is delivered both by human servers and robot servers that roll over to your table/booth and highlight which shelf your food is on. When dining with Charlie, the emotional roller coaster of “is the robot coming with our food?” or “oh this guy in a black shirt is dropping off our food” can be intense and devastating. On very busy days, you’ll be lucky to have a couple items delivered by robots but on a quiet lunch visit we had almost everything delivered by robot.
You’ll find just about every sushi option you can imagine on the menu. They have hand rolls, traditional maki rolls, over the top “premium” maki rolls, sashimi and “sushi pizza” pieces. Their cheese strawberry maki roll (strawberry, cream cheese) is a big hit with Charlie. All of which is portioned as you’d find at most sushi restaurants around the area.
The various options of teriyaki (beef, chicken, salmon) come out to the table like a sizzling hot fajita and have been a must order every time. You will also find dumplings, soups, fried rice, curry bowls (I’m a big fan of the green curry) and a couple types of satay in addition to a selection of daily specials. These portions are not as large as you’d find in a traditional a la carte restaurant but it makes sense when you are trying as many dishes as possible.
The restaurant is already very popular and we’ve generally made reservations for dinner time and have been able to just walk in for lunch service. The service has always been above average, with friendly servers who never let you wait too long to put another food order into the kitchen.
It is not a cheap meal by any measure but we’ve always walked away from Wind feeling satisfied and looking forward to another visit.