Dunn Tire Park, Buffalo, NY
Web: National Buffalo Wing Festival
Phone: 716.565.4141
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Buffalo Chicken Wings
Taste may be purely personal, but having eaten lots of chicken wings all across the globe, it's our firm conviction that Buffalo's traditional wing sauce - particularly as it's served at certain restaurants - is the best around. The 2008 National Buffalo Wing Festival exposed attendees to lots of alternative flavors, including everything mentioned in Part 3, yet it's hard to imagine that the chicken wing would have become world famous covered in the sweet coconut or loganberry sauces some people have come up with. To us, they're diversions, and it's the hot sauce - particularly the really hot sauce - that made Buffalo Wings worthy of their own festival. So who had the best hot wings at this year's National Buffalo Wing Festival? Without Duff's as a competitor, our favorite traditional wings this year were from one restaurant that has built a great reputation outside of Buffalo, and plans to open its first location here in two months. The name?
Quaker Steak & Lube. Founded in Pennsylvania over 35 years ago, this motor-themed wing, steak, and sandwich chain would never have caught our attention without a tip from a friend 10 years ago. Back then, we stopped in and were actually impressed by two of their spiciest traditional flavors - Atomic and Hot - trying both without any complaints as to the authenticity of the sauce. It was plenty hot, flavorful, and virtually as good as Buffalo's best places at that time. Having tried four of the non-traditional flavors, we sampled the Atomic again at WingFest '08 to see if it was still worthwhile, and it definitely was everything we remembered in terms of both intense spice and quality flavor. Mark our words, Quaker Steak & Lube is going to be the first real rival to the Duff's crown for traditional-styled wings when it opens in Williamsville this year; the first and second photos here show the booth and the Atomics.
As we understand it, however, Legend Larry's D.O.A. ("Dead on Arrival") sauce won this year's official festival award in the extra hot traditional category; three wings coated in them are shown in our third picture here. We can't explain the victory, beyond to say that the D.O.A. wings were good, but not special by comparison with Quaker's Atomics or other spicy wings we tried there. The only reason we remember these wings at all was a comment made by someone behind us in line: "what's a dough-a wing? Sounds weird." Exactly.
Previously discussed in Part 3, a small vendor called Sean's Booyah was serving an award-winning hot sauce and doing a spectacular job of promoting itself from a relatively small booth - Sean was whipping up sauces in front of the line of people, and cheering on attendees who called out "Booyah" after trying his wings; miniature award medals were given out to people who were willing to sign up for an e-mailing list. The only problem: we found the wing sauce here to be one or two steps shy of disgusting, consisting of something like 3 or 4 parts butter to 1 part spice. While the wings were amongst the wettest we were served at WingFest, they tasted like eating a molten stick of Land O' Lakes with chili pepper, a big disappointment given how capable the restaurant was of projecting a great image. They're shown in the fourth photo.
We intentionally passed on getting wings from Wing Zone, a large chain with 25 different wing flavors. They just looked way too greasy and overfried for our tastes; their otherwise professional-looking booth, touting wing delivery services, is shown in photo five.
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's Arooga's Grille House & Sports Bar was offering three different sauces, one a sweet chili powder sauce called Red Thai, another a mix of four sauces (hot, BBQ, cajun and garlic herb) called Almost Everything, and a pure hot sauce called the Kangarooga, shown in photo six. Mixing habaneros, jalapenos, crushed peppers, chili powder, curry, cilantro, honey, carrots and celery, the Kangarooga was one of those sauces that just had too much going on for its own good. We tried it and found the flavor predictably spicy but indistinct; it was perhaps no surprise that one side of Arooga's booth was solely devoted to offering double-dipped wings with two sauces, and not busy from what we could see. Would anyone really want to sort through 20 different ingredients in one wing?
Our seventh photo shows what wings looked like at the Wing Street/Pizza Hut booth, which we skipped for traditional wings as noted in Part 3 - we've tried the wings before, and the stuff here is just greasy and not very good. While we dream of a day when a restaurant chain with this sort of coast-to-coast reach, the right equipment, and no shortage of resources can just get the traditional wing recipe right, we suppose that every mistake a big chain makes allows smaller businesses to continue their dominance of this particular flavor category.
Finally, an Arizona-based chain called the Native New Yorker Restaurant offered a traditional wing sauce that they called Hot; we found the wings served in it to be fine, neither memorable or special in any way, and relatively dry by comparison with hot wings we prefer. They're still better than the Wing Street wings, though, and shown in the last of the pictures here.
There were a few other places serving traditional-style wings at WingFest '08, but we didn't visit them for various reasons: a Maryland chain called Buffalo Wings and Beer got us into line with a barker who encouraged people to try their wings. Unfortunately, when we got up to the front of the line and saw someone with a cold sore handling wings with bare hands, we turned chicken - bad pun - and passed on trying the "Rooster" hot wings. We found out later that they call the really hot ones "Cock" wings. Seriously.
We skipped the traditional wings (called Buffalo, Buffalo II, and Buffalo III for spice levels) at Louisiana's World of Wings (WOW) Cafe and Wingery because the sauce looked way too thin, and the Anchor Bar because we've had their wings recently and weren't impressed. Similarly, known nothing-special chains such as Tully's, Jack Astor's, and Kentucky Fried Chicken were also selling wings of various types, along with boneless breaded wings from a place called Wing Coop, chicken fingers from a place called Barber Foods, and a variety of different flavored wings from a Buffalo restaurant called Swings that eventually looked interesting but wasn't serving when we made our first pass through the place. Swings and the Anchor Bar had fairly long lines; maybe next year we'll save enough space to give them a shot.
Our hope is that WingFest '09 has a larger assortment of local traditional wing specialists; it seemed like a majority of the restaurants offering "true" Buffalo Wings this year were out-of-towners, and though a few seem to understand what constitutes an authentic Buffalo Wing, it's obvious that many others simply stink at making wings with the taste or texture of the real thing. It shouldn't be hard to find the best-tasting wings at a festival devoted to them, and more local places should be part of making that happen. Until then, we'll be enjoying our wings at Duff's, and soon enough, Quaker Steak and Lube, as well.
In any case, it was great to get a chance to see what so many other restaurants were doing nationwide, and we're very glad that the National Buffalo Wing Festival exists to make that possible. Despite any feelings about the quality (or lack thereof) of the individual wings we tried, we definitely plan to attend next year's event - so long as there are some new and interesting restaurants, or familiar excellent ones, to visit.
