Met up with Mak, Tim, and Alex for the first deck tour of summer yesterday. Sure, it technically isn’t summer yet, and technically we only visited one deck, but all that really matters is that Duke’s Riverside no longer has the Bleu Burger. They still serve burgers, and since they still serve salads it stands to reason that they still have bleu cheese dressing, but apparently someone decided that combining the two was not in their best business interest.

Anyway, we arrived around 2 and left around 6 — a far cry from our marathon 12-hour sessions of summer ‘05, but it’ll do. After some misguided information about Coyote Joe’s (which sounded like an interesting place but turned out to be filled with retirees when we arrived) and the misguided pro-Apple rantings of a dog named Lucy, we wound up over at the Camp Hill Starbucks.

It was there that I realized that Duke’s had changed the seasoning on their wings.

Since they didn’t have the Bleu Burger, I had to fall back to my old standby, the sampler platter. If you’ve somehow managed to move to the area without a G-Man / Duke’s sampler platter (they’re identical), you don’t know what you’re missing. Onion rings, thick fries, jalapeno poppers, cheese sticks, wings, and cheese & bacon potato wedges for just under $10. Despite the running dispute on whether or not this can actually be served on the deck (it can if you’re nice to your waitress), it’s the perfect accompaniment to an afternoon-into-night of drink specials on the deck. Except that this time, something was different about the wings.

They were still good, but they had changed. My vote goes for the seasoning. About 20 minutes after I started in on the platter, I started to get a really strange headache. Sudafed (I thought it was allergies) didn’t help. Advil didn’t help. Coffee didn’t help. By the time we left Duke’s, I was exhausted. Then dizzy. Then it felt like I had the flu. I had to cut my portion of the night short and head home. An hour in a scalding-hot shower — the ultimate cure-all for any migraine — didn’t help. By this point, “flu-like” doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt. It was all I could do to barely fall asleep.

This feels more like there was some really strange seasoning on the wings (or maybe it was the artichoke dip) that I wasn’t expecting. Or maybe it was an off night for the cook. Having been a riverside devotee for the past 8 or 9 years, I’m pretty much used to their entire menu, so this was really unexpected.

Still, you can’t have summer in Harrisburg without Riverside. Here’s to many all-day weekends spent on the deck.