33380 Wick RoadBack to Detroit. I told you this was going to be a wild weekend.
I left my family in Chicago on Friday and drove back to Kalamazoo. I had to work in Detroit Saturday night.
Typically, I meet a co-worker at the Love’s Truck Stop in Lansing and we go to Detroit together but this time, there were three of them coming. We couldn’t all fit in one car with all of the equipment we needed so I asked if I could just meet them in Detroit this time and they agreed.
I was kind of excited about this because there is a place near the Detroit Airport I’ve been wanting to stop at. This was finally going to be my opportunity.
I’ve been to Sheetz many times. Mostly in Ohio or Pennsylvania on my way to the East Coast somewhere. I’ve only blogged about it once because I’ve really only gotten food from there once. It’s typically a gas or bathroom stop but I always love finding these gas stations because they’re always pretty clean and really well stocked.
Michigan got it’s first Sheetz location last fall in Romulus. The gas station is just off I-94 at the Vining Road interchange. The building is just to the north on Wick Road. There’s not much else around it right now but with this huge gas station, the area near the freeway exit will likely become a prime retail area.
The gas station isn’t different from most highway gas stations. There is, of course, a large area with snacks and drinks near the cash registers when you walk in. I grabbed myself a couple of Pepsi’s and headed over to order food.
Food ordering is done at a touch screen kiosk. The closest thing we have here in West Michigan are the Speedy Cafe’s. Sheetz has a lot more options for food though. You punch the order in yourself and it kicks out a ticket. You take that to the register or the self service check out kiosks on the other side of the store to pay.
There’s a decent sized seating area near the kitchen. Most people were just using this area to wait for food but there is plenty of room to sit and eat before you get back on the road. There’s a TV screen with order numbers on it so you can watch how far along your order is. Once it’s ready, a kitchen worker calls out the number and if it’s paid for, you can grab it and go.
My order was the A Big Mozz Burger and a large order of fries with VooDoo Seasoning. The cost with two bottles of Pepsi was just under $18 and it took about ten minutes for my order to be made.
I started with the fries when I hoped back in the car. The large order of fries was pretty large. They are frozen skin-on fries that are nice and crispy. I added the VooDoo Seasoning and there was a lot of it. VooDoo seasoning typically consists of brown sugar which makes it a little sweet plus a number of other spices including cayenne which make it a little spicy. The fries were delicious but there was a lot of seasoning on them. I tried to shake some of it off but it was stuck on pretty good. Not bad, just would have gone a little bit lighter on it if I could have.
The Big Mozz Burger is Sheetz’s kind of bland looking burger patty with faux grill marks topped with provolone cheese, marinara sauce, and Mozzarella Sticks. The burger itself is a pretty typical gas station burger which surprisingly is always kind of good. I don’t know why I like gas station cheeseburgers so much but I typically grab one when I see one when I’m getting gas. This burger topped with Mozzarella sticks was fun. I was worried about making a mess while I was driving but I was hungry and decided to take a chance. There was just enough marinara on it to be present in every bite but not so much I was going to end up wearing it. The Mozzarella sticks were really cheesy and did the whole cheese pull thing on every bite. It’s a stunt food kind of burger but it’s tasty and substantial enough that I didn’t need to stop for dinner during our job later that night.
Sheetz is quality gas station food.
I’m on the road quite a bit and I grab sandwiches from gas stations all the time. Sheetz is better than most and it’s so great that they have quite a few options. I had stopped on my way from Detroit later that night/early the next morning and though about grabbing breakfast but there was a lot of people in there and I didn’t want to wait. I had to get back up in a few hours to get back to Chicago (more on that in the next post) so I just wanted to get home.
I hope Sheetz keeps expanding in Michigan and I hope at some point, we get one on this side of the state. It’s not something that’s worth going out of the way for, but if you pass one, I’d definitely stop and grab something to eat.