Off the Map: This Must Be What It Feels Like to Be Smacked

Dip Sum Donuts – Buddakan, Atlantic City, NJ
Buddakan

**So we're morons have have discovered that the Atlantic City Buddakan's donuts aren't actually the Best Thing I Ever Ate donuts.  Please see our addendum to this post about Marc Summers's actual Philadelphia choice here.**

Finally, the booze seems to be wearing off and the pain from walking into a door is starting to hit Ginger.

“This must be what it feels like to be smacked,” she surmises.  Unfortunately, our dinner at Buddakan does not help matters.  We are also smacked on our palates.

Buddakan features Marc Summers’s best dish to eat WITH MY HANDS, the dip sum donuts.  It is a restaurant with locations in Philadelphia (where Ginger has previously dined) and New York, but we decide to check off our tour itinerary at the Atlantic City outpost.

Beach a Mere Feet Away

By this point, we are already losing steam, what with the royal wedding wake-up hour and our insistence to start drinking Skinnygirl margaritas at 3:00pm.  Plus, we have Ginger’s head trauma to contend with.

We order our cocktails – the Luck (it contains ginger, so you can imagine who ordered it) and the Bonsai.  Both are just fine.  In truth, the Bonsai, which features floating leaves of some parsley-like creation, is verging on bad.

Our Cocktails Pose with Vodka's New Sunglasses

We then procure the edamame ravioli and the beef lo mein, both of which are fairly scrumptious (albeit the beef in the lo mein seems to have met about a thousand salt licks in its lifetime).

Looks Like an Easter Bonnet

Where Salt Comes to Die

Then come the Best Thing I Ever Ate dish, the dip sum donuts.  And they are not good.

Perhaps Buddakan has changed their donuts since Marc Summers ventured here, but these donuts are barely doughy and filled with a banana-flavored cream.  They come with chocolate, caramel, and red bean dipping sauces, all of which are sickly sweet.  (And we are not ones to complain about sweetness).  The sauces feel like they are with the wrong dessert; when combined with the banana cream filling, and the sugar coating on the donuts, there is nothing to cut through the sugar.  Just more sugar.  Plus, the banana cream drips out all over the plate, adding to the debacle of it all.

These Look Better Than They Tasted

Ginger makes an array of facial contortions, and we try to flag our waiter down so we can escape the memory of these donuts.  We’d take a dozen of Doughnut Plant’s peanut butter and jelly “sandwiches” before these.

Our waiter, unfortunately, is not the most attentive soul, but we don’t even have the strength to fight about the fact that it takes him 20 minutes to come back around and give us our check.  We have been beaten down, by both a door and by shoddy excuses for high-roller restaurants.

Seconds Before the Banana Cream Permeated the Sauce

Trying to make ourselves feel better, we go to the Apple store and clandestinely pull up this very blog on every iPad and MacBook available.  Guerilla marketing at its finest.  And then we retreat back to our balcony, more eager to drink at home than out at oliveless bars and parsley-obsessed restaurants.

You're Welcome, America

In truth, the best things we ate down the shore came from Wawa, not Continental or Buddakan.  Which reminds us: someone, please, bring a Wawa to Manhattan.  We will singlehandedly keep the place in business.

**While these are not the correct Best Thing I Ever Ate donuts, we feel as though we need to retain this post in order to warn the public not to eat them.  If you would like to read about the Philadelphia Buddakan donuts (which are much better), please go to our updated review here.**

Buddakan’s Dip Sum Donuts: 2 stars