Quack-Ups Restaurant & Catering

I started going to Quack-Ups in the 90s, when a friend owned a cabin nearby. We would go to Quack-Ups for dinner, both eat-in and take-out. I've never had a bad meal there. Their Southern Italian dishes (i.e., with tomato sauce) are delicious. Their Northern Italian dishes, while also delicious, aren't always exactly what you might expect.  The seafood lasagna, for example merits a special comment just for its presentation. Unfortunately, they were out of it when we visited, so I don't have a photo of it. Maybe next time.

The decor is quite unique. When you walk in it feels like "eclectic duck store meets taxidermy lab." It would not surprise me if members of PETA either run away screaming or fall into a fetal position in a corner when experiencing the combination of duck items and stuffed animals.

It's always a plus for me when an Italian restaurant has a salad bar, and their soup and salad bar is no exception. Tonight's soup, a spicy sausage and vegetable, was indeed spicy - at least the broth was. Evidently the patrons who were there earlier scooped out all the good stuff.  The salad bar has a large bowl of iceberg lettuce (it could be chopped into smaller pieces), cherry tomatoes, numerous vegetables and slices of what have to be button mushrooms on steroids - the largest button mushrooms I've ever seen.  They have one of my favorite salad dressings, a homemade creamy bacon horseradish dressing. I would have been content to just pour that over everything in the salad bar and just go at it with a fork. Of the typically 9 dressings available, that is one of the 3 made at the restaurant. My sister had another, a creamy garlic, which she said was among the best she's ever had.

Besides a full bar, they have a beer list starting at $4, and various wines including a generous glass of various house wines at $5.95

We were a little surprised tonight that something about each of our dinners was slightly off.  My chicken francese was a plate of breaded pieces of chicken breast in a lemony sauce. The sauce was indeed full of lemon flavor, but it was much thicker than expected. The side of angel hair pasta, instead of being served on the plate with the chicken was in a side bowl with tomato sauce. Chicken francese is sort-of a Northern Italian dish, which means brown sauce, not tomato sauce.

My sister's shrimp scampi was 5 large shrimp on a bed of pasta. She said the sauce was "good garlicky" with a pleasing garlic aftertaste. However, she had requested angel hair pasta as well, and it was served with linquine. The waitress offered to take the dish back and give her the angel hair as requested, but my sister declined saying it would be an unnecessary waste of food.

My mom ordered chicken cordon bleu. This was smaller than expected but served on a huge plate of linguine. Instead of slices of ham the stuffing contained chunks of ham. But the entire dish was drenched with an alfredo sauce. I've always seen it with either a brown sauce or a thinner cheese and wine-based sauce. The sauce was too filling for the meal.

I want to point out that even though none of these dishes were exactly what we expected, EVERYTHING WAS DELICIOUS. While this set of dinners would probably have been a 3-star meal on their own, it was not enough to diminish my enjoyment of many years of good dining here, salad bar, dinners and desserts.

Be careful walking outside in the parking lot after dark. This is a very rural area (a mile or so from the southern tip of Cossayuna Lake) with little local lighting.

In the middle of nowhere (CR 48and 49) this place is worth a visit., specially if visiting Greenwich, Argyle. or, the Cossayuna Lake area.  All of the food is freshly prepared and the menu is quite extensive.  More like home cooking than haute cusine, with many Italian-American and all American offerings, and of course duck. The owner is in the kitchen making the food.   It has a well stocked bar and a nice salad/soup bar (soups are uniformly very good) .  I usually avoid places with a salad bar, but here it seems to fit..
The place itself is a goof with many varied and amusing  items as decor.  Check out the guy sitting at the front table on the right as you enter. On our first visit my wife insisted i needed to use the rest room.  When I asked why, she said she wanted to know if it was as  weirdly (in a good way) decorated as the ladies room she had just used,.  It was  weirdly decorated also, though not having seem the ladies room I could not really compare.
They prices are quite reasonable and they have usually dinner specials at rock bottom (for what's offered) prices w/coupons in the local papers.
NB call before you go to make sure they are open.