“Great Food for Great People!!”

Is that so, Wing King? King of Wings? Great food, for great people? Well, even if what you’re selling can be considered ‘great food’, how can you guarantee your customers are ‘great people’? Bad people like wings too. And, more importantly, what the hell kind of slogan is that?!? Great food for great people. Pfft. If you truly are the king of wings, you could probably do better than hiring an eight year old to come up with your slogan. Actually, consider transferring that kid to your webdesign department.

The Wing King has been around for about as long as I can remember, sitting “proudly” on Fletcher just east of I275. Somehow, in all my years of Tamponing, I’ve never paid them a visit. I can’t say exactly why that is… I love wings with such a fiery, burning passion that you’d think I’d have stopped by much sooner. Perhaps it is because I’ve known of its existence for so long I’ve just let it slip into the scenery. This is not treatment worthy of a king!! So, in an attempt to remedy this mistake, I picked up some food from the king himself. (The king himself was a young female.)

The Wing King offers lots of wacky type food like oxtails and gizzards, but they mostly they boast a huge variety of different types of wings. So many different flavors! Check it out yourself at the 35 Kingdom of Flavors. But watch out for rogue bullet points!!

These particular wings are called the “fries wings”. They are flavored a bit salty, and have a light, fluffy, almost potato-y inside. I must admit that I’ve never had wings like these before, which is kind of cool I guess. But they tasted bland and boring, like they came out of the frozen food section at your local suitebaye. Not good wings.

Heeeeere we go. This looks much more familiar/normal. These are their medium wings. Medium, normal wings. Ultimately, this is how I judge a wing place. So how were they? Not bad. But in no way great. They had a really nice spice to them, which I respected. The burn was pretty good for a medium, and it was noticeably a different type of spice than you usually find in a traditional wing sauce. Unique! It seemed to take advantage of dry seasonings post-sauce for a lot of the taste. But the main flavor of the sauce itself was a bit too far from normal, and too bland, for me to really effectively buy into. I ended up dipping a lot of these in either ranch or the lemon pepper sauce.

We had ordered a fifty wing combo to eat among three coworkers and myself. It comes with a large fries wings, a two liter bottle of soda, and fifty wings to be split into up to three sauce styles. Obviously we went with medium for one. next was lemon pepper, one of my favorite non-traditional wing styles (most notably consumed at Wingstop). These wings were alright. Actually pretty decent. They had a good amount of “slime” to hang out in, and they were well peppered, but I feel like the two flavors didn’t meld together like they usually do. Wingstop’s are better.

Our last chosen flavor was garlic teriyaki. Ew wtf gross blah blah yeah I know I get it. That’s what I thought. I was disappointed we didn’t go with garlic parmesan, a great wing flavor seeming to become more and more popular. But my coworkers wanted this. So this is what we got. And you know what? It was the best flavor of the bunch. They were really quite good! The teriyaki was more like a glaze than a sauce, which is about what you’d want. It wasn’t too strong, surprisingly well balanced with the garlic. The teriyaki was prominent, but the garlic provided just enough punch to make itself known, and to pull an otherwise ordinary, likely “too much” teriyaki sauce into a place of quiet perfection. I’ve never had a sauce like this end up tasting so good, and I doubt I will again. It was a bit of magic. The Wing King must have enlisted the help of his Wing Wizard. or his Wing Mage.

So what’s the verdict on the King? Meh. Not too impressed. To their credit, their wings are consistently a good, large size. But they still have those little wing tips on them, and that grosses me out. BECAUSE I’M A MAN. And the service was not great. I ordered ahead and was told everything would be ready in fifteen minutes. I got there about twenty minutes later, and I still had to wait at least ten more minutes for everything to be ready. They do have a lot of flavors, but really, a good chunk of those flavors are just different combinations of a few basic flavors. They make a good garlic teriyaki, but is that enough? No. Not to be called king. Earl, maybe. Wing Earl.