Review: Six Flags New England's Asian-Inspired Restaurant, Chop Six

For years, I’ve been promising my kids a trip to Six Flags New England — a theme park that’s three hours and fifteen minutes away, or four and a half if you actually have kids. But we’re busy people. My kids attend day camp all summer. Weekends are somehow always booked solid. Then my son decided to go to college on Sunday (Brandeis University, thank you very much, and yes — he’s officially five years removed from his bone marrow transplant now), which meant we’d officially run out of summers to procrastinate. So yesterday, I finally rammed a trip onto the calendar.

For those unfamiliar with Six Flags, it’s an amusement park absolutely packed with roller coasters named after DC Comics characters (Superman, Batman, The Riddler, etc.). The core business model is simple: you pay money to stand in line for twenty to forty-five minutes so that you can be violently jostled around for about ninety seconds. All the rides are basically the same jostling motion at different heights, with different loops and barrel twists, but the effect is roughly identical — a rush of adrenaline followed by several hours of queasiness and, if you’re a certain age, back twinges courtesy of the rapid starting and stopping. Again, we pay for this experience.

We arrived around 11 a.m. when the park opened and immediately began standing in queues for various roller coasters. The plan was to start small, work our way up to Superman, allegedly the tallest coaster in New England.

We’d had a small breakfast before leaving very early, and because teenagers are teenagers, we kept pushing off lunch: “One more ride, and then lunch,” until it was 2:30 p.m., we were all in various stages of physical collapse from standing, and motion-sick from the coasters. Suddenly, lunch was not optional.

When you’re at an amusement park on a hot day, mostly known for violently shaking your organs, the last thing anyone wants is greasy food. Naturally, that’s all Six Flags offers. My son insisted on pizza, which meant standing behind a camp group from Boston for twenty minutes. When he ordered, the teenager working the window asked if he wanted one slice or two. Given his hunger level, he didn’t hesitate: two slices.

That’ll be $35.

For. Two. Slices. Of. Pizza. Seventeen-fifty per slice for congealed cheese on a slab of undercooked dough. He ate both.

My daughters and I, however, were not settling for pizza, burgers, or anything fried. We trekked to the other side of the park to a place called Chop Six, a fast-food Asian spot that promised “fresh” food. Never trust “fresh” food from an amusement park. The twins inexplicably love Panda Express and were hoping for a similar experience.

It was not a similar experience.

Three entree choices: Orange Chicken, Spicy Chicken, Beef & Broccoli. One realistic side choice: lo mein. You couldn’t order two sides and an entree. The only option was two entrees and a side for $22, double what you’d pay at Panda Express. The girls ordered two orange chickens. I got Spicy Chicken and Beef & Broccoli. Add two waters and whatever taxes and “convenience” fees they felt like inventing, and the bill came to $63. There was no line here—which should have been a warning sign—but it still took five minutes for a teenager to spoon the food onto paper plates.

Here’s the thing about Panda Express: the first several bites are actually decent. They’ve mastered the MSG-and-mouthfeel alchemy perfectly, and regret only sets in halfway through. With Chop Six, the regret was immediate.

I can’t speak for the orange chicken. But the beef and broccoli in the Beef & Broccoli were virtually indistinguishable from each other—a vaguely brown pile of mush with the mouthfeel of dog vomit, minus any of the regurgitated flavor. We hadn’t eaten in eight hours and had been walking all day. Starving, I forced these soggy chunks down my gullet, barely capable of swallowing. Once in my stomach, I am fairly certain the beef reanimated, like chunks of zombie devouring the from the inside.

It was somehow better than the Spicy Chicken, which had the mouthfeel of a dirty sock and tasted like salt that had somehow gone rancid. I’ve never tasted spoiled salt before, so at the very least, it was a new experience. A deeply unpleasant one. I managed two bites: one to confirm how awful it was, and a second to make sure my taste buds weren’t pranking me. They weren’t.

Thank God for the lo mein, which had the benefit of being completely tasteless. I’d never been so relieved to eat something that didn’t register. There was one brownish cherry tomato I avoided like RFK avoids vaccines, but otherwise, these slimy, flavorless worms at least didn’t assault my palate. They did, however, sit heavy in my stomach for hours — even my own gastric juices turned their nose up at the job, insisting I carry the weight of those noodles as Superman and Batman flung me around for the next several hours.

That’s Chop Six: the worst $63 I’ve ever spent on anything meant to be consumed. Next time, I’m going with the $17.50 pizza slices. I suggest anyone in the same boat do the same.