Transit & W. Main St., Lockport, NY 14094
Web: Taste of Lockport
Phone: 716.636.5797
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Alcohol Desserts Drinks Festivals Ice Cream Lockport Seafood Wine
"The best of the desserts was from Udder Delights, which was selling $2 Walking Sticks of chocolate-covered, popsicle-sticked, and creamy Handmade Gourmet Ice Cream."
Lockport's Ida Fritz Park isn't easy to find with Google Maps - it's at the corner of Transit and Lockport's West Main - but for several hours on one summer day, it hosts what now may well be Western New York's largest gathering of local wineries, plus a collection of nearby restaurants. This is the Taste of Lockport, a managably-sized, American food-heavy festival that occupies a triangular loop made from parts of West Avenue, Park Avenue, and Hawley Street, plus the grassy park in the center. With roughly 30 local businesses on hand, it's bigger than the Taste of Clarence and Taste of Lancaster, similar in size to the Taste of Williamsville, and a little under half the size of the Taste of Buffalo. Tickets aren't required for food or drink purchases; virtually everything is sold for $3 or less, with some items at $2. Here's what we saw and sampled.
Appetizer and Entree Options. Virtually all of the food at the Taste of Lockport was American or Italian, and vendors brought lots of sandwiches - particularly Beef on Wecks - plus beef, chicken, and seafood dishes. There were so many seafood items that we felt obliged to sample a bunch, but missed at least twice as many as we tried, as we passed this time on the many bisques and gumbos on offer.
Notably, the longest lines in the food section were at Mrs. Ribs, a stand that was selling $3 ribs and chicken with a "secret" barbecue sauce that we waited around 20 minutes to sample. Ribs in hand, we understood the wait: the pork rib meat was grilled perfectly to delicious tenderness, though it was fatty, and the barbecue sauce was a bit too sweet and thin for our liking. Not bad, though. One of the shortest lines was at Taboo, which offered Chicken and Biscuits as one dish, and a Chipotle Aioli with Grilled Chicken ($2) as another, which we tried. This dish of bowtie pasta came in a very lightly chipotle-flavored red sauce with more tiny pieces of chopped vegetable than meat - we actually couldn't find any chicken in it, and didn't like the flavor enough to finish the small cup.
One of the "basically impossible to screw up" items we came across was the Jumbo Casino Crab Stuffed Shrimp ($3) from the Basket Factory, a single prawn that was wrapped in a soft strip of bacon, packed with breading and crab meat, then served on a plate with chunked tomatoes and onions. If you really need to hear more than the words "bacon, crab, and shrimp" to know whether it would be worthwhile to find a way to sample this in the future, we'll say that the item was a little soggier than we'd have expected, but the flavor combination is hard to beat.
Also notable in the seafood category were two dishes from Cammarata's, the Crab Cakes ($3) and the Coconut Shrimp with Raspberry Sauce ($3). There was something about the shrimp dish in particular that really hooked us from moment one - it might have been the fresh-tasting, finely breaded, deep-fried coconut batter on the shrimp, but we think it's the unusual and nice inclusion of that thinner than jam raspberry dip, which contrasts with the citrusy and pina colada versions most such coconut shrimp include. We came close to loving this; by comparison, the Crab Cakes were very substantially made from crab meat rather than breading, and were good enough to like, though not major standouts. Both plates were good values for the prices.
The last seafood item we tried was from Shamus Restaurant, which offered a Blackened Sea Scallop ($3), served in a glaze of dijon and caramelized onions. Like the broth of a good French onion soup, the sauce was thin, sweet, and heavy in onion flavor, competing pretty aggressively with the flavor inside the slightly charred single scallop on the plate. It was fine, not fantastic.
In addition to restaurants we've previously covered, including Garlock's, Molinaro's Ristorante, One-Eyed Jack's BBQ, and Papa Leo's, other food vendors at the Taste of Lockport included Applebee's - quite possibly the most frequently represented national chain restaurant at local food festivals, and one of the least busy no matter where we go - Carmella's Italian Kitchen, Carson's Country Deli, Cousin's Cafe, Danny Sheehan's Steak House, DeFlippo's, Manhattan's, Pour Boyz Grill & Tap Room, Scapelliti's Italian Sausage, and Wagner's Restaurant.
Desserts. While Sweet Melody's continues to entice us at virtually every one of these food festivals with its gelatos and sorbets, we tried to focus our attention on places we hadn't visited before, and sampled desserts from three different places. On this roughly 90-degree afternoon, we had no problem with the Taste of Lockport's several ice cream shop options, and actually sought them out early in our visit.
The best of the bunch was "Handmade Gourmet Ice Cream" vendor Udder Delights, which was selling $3 sundaes and $2 "Walking Sticks" of chocolate-covered, popsicle-sticked ice cream; we went with the coffee-flavored Walking Stick. Both of us really enjoyed the extremely creamy, gentle coffee ice cream and nice chocolate hard shell, and felt that it was hard to actually walk with the stick - the ice cream made us want to sit in the shade and relax. It set a bar that the other shop we visited, Lake Effect Ice Cream, couldn't hurdle. Lake Effect's list of flavors was awesome, catching our eye with Crystal Beach Loganberry, which turned out to be very lightly flavored, Guinness Chocolate Stout, which tasted somewhat like Guinness beer with miniature chocolate chips inside, and finally, Strawberries and Cream, which had chunks of strawberries in a creamy base. All three of the ice creams were too icy, as if they'd melted and then been refrozen, and we didn't wind up wanting to finish any of them. But they were cheap, at $5 for three 4-ounce cups.
Last on our dessert list was Dee's Sugar Shack, which according to its sign specialized in "home cooked meals." The $2 Cherry-Raspberry Cobbler was covered in whipped cream and tasted like most of the contents of a can of slightly sour cherry pie filling had been mixed with a little bit of sweet but soggy graham cracker-like crust. It was one of very few items at the Taste that we could have made better ourselves at home.
Wineries. Though it wasn't the most heavily trafficked part of the event, we really liked the strip of Park Avenue that was dedicated to wineries, a live band, and a few non-winery vendors. This was our first opportunity to visit Leonard Oakes Estate Winery, a Medina-based vineyard we've missed on several different visits to the area's wine country. Oakes had 12 different wines on offer, so we did a $2 tasting of three - a fine sweet and spicy red Vinho Tesouro, a Fuji Apple Wine that tasted like an apple and white wine blend but was said to be purely apple, and the Olde English Sparkling Cidre, a clean and fairly typical sweet sparkling apple cider. Lines were longest at the Niagara Landing Wine Cellars, which was offering both $2 tastings and $3 Rosebud Wine Slushies, made from ice, lemon lime soda, and full bottles of its rose Rosebud wine. These were nice, sweet drinks, but not as compelling as the slushies commonly sold at Taste of Buffalo.
Other wineries at the event included ones we've covered previously: Vizcarra Vineyards/Becker Farms, Freedom Run Winery, Honeymoon Trail Winery, Schulze Vineyard & Winery, and The Winery at Marjim Manor. Spring Lake Winery was also supposed to be there, but we didn't see the booth if it was.
From a big picture standpoint, we were both pleased by the Taste of Lockport. Apart from slow-moving lines at two of the vendors, due more to their prep than anything else, everything seemed to be running smoothly: the event offered a nice combination of tableside seating in the park and standing room on the streets, audible but not offensively loud music near the center of the event, and a nice variety of restaurants. The best thing about this festival was the opportunity it offered to sample wines from multiple local vineyards, while its least attractive element was its duration: it runs only from 12pm to 6pm on a Sunday, missing the dinner hour for most people. Given the array of restaurants and the good to great quality of much of the food we sampled, the Taste of Lockport is an event that deserves its own weekend, and given the strong showing of wineries in particular, far more local attention than it has previously received.
