Category — Site News
On Fire at the Wild Wing Cafe - Charleston, SC
Yes, I’m getting around to trip updates from the Charleston excursion.
If there’s ever a mecca for wing eaters, it’d be the Wild Wing Cafe. At any given moment, Wild Wing has over 30 different types of wings, ranging from five or six different heat levels of your standard buffalo wing, to alternate flavors such as Thai, Lemon Pepper, or Garlic.
Wild Wing also lays claim to one of my favorite appetizers, the Hot Shot, which is what you see pictured above. A basket of Hot Shots, along with an introductory beer, is the preferred way of slipping into a meal here. Served piping hot straight from the fryer, hot shots are similar to fritters and consist of spicy sausage, cheese, and batter-of-some-sort, rolled into balls and fried crispy. All of this is served with a dipping sauce that looks like a tub of melted margarine with some lemon pepper thrown into it (which is probably exactly what it is). It’s the finest appetizer of its kind.
Coming to Wild Wing immediately after checking in at the hotel, we were fortunate to find ourselves arriving on Wild Wednesday, which is their way of saying ‘2 for 1′ on the wings. Charleston is, after all, a college town, so there’s lots of deals to be found that are appropriate for a college student’s budget. We each ordered a dozen, with two varieties per order for a total of four flavors. The hardest thing about coming to Wild Wing is figuring out which kinds you want. We ended up getting Gold Rush, Garlic! Garlic! Garlic!, Lemon Pepper, and CHINA SYNDROME.
Gold Rush and Lemon Pepper have been our favorite flavors since well before we were married, so it was a no-brainer to order them. The Lemon Pepper is exactly as it sounds - the wings are tossed in a light margarine coating, and then liberally sprinkled with lemon pepper seasoning. They aren’t spicy, but they sure are tasty.
The Gold Rush, which is my pick, is a tangy, slightly spicy, slightly sweet sauce. The menu describes it as honey BBQ with a kick, but the flavor is more subtle, less cloying than your typical honey barbecue flavor - and I think the barbecue in this case may have been mustard-based.
So that brings me to the China Syndrome story.
I have quite a tolerance for heat. For some time now, I’ve maxed out on the heat level at Hooters, and their 911 wings don’t affect me at all. Everywhere I go, I tend to order the hottest level of wing that is on offer, and, for the most part, I am rarely impressed. So, when it came time to order a typical straight buffalo wing at Wild Wing, well, I went for China Syndrome. On the menu, it’s two steps above the typical ‘Hot’, and two steps below what the restaurant calls Braveheart. When our food came out, it’s the first one that my fingers went for, and I promise you, I will never, ever order that flavor ever again.
I have been defeated by a buffalo wing. Here’s the thing about the wings at Wild Wing - they aren’t served covered in sauce, like you’ve seen in other places. Here, what seems to be happening is that the cooks fry the wings, toss them in sauce, and then pop them into the oven for a bit, so that the sauce bakes onto the wings. The sauce still comes off on your fingers, but they’re a little neater. So, with the China Syndrome, what I discovered that evening is that the wings actually had red pepper flakes baked into them, and that’s what made all of the difference.
How Internet-Land Can Actually Be Quite Small Sometimes
It is always refreshingly surprising when the vast nature of the internet gives way to a genuine feeling of community, as it did over this past weekend.
On Saturday evening, I checked the traffic statistics for this site to discover a small mini-surge of visitors. This was really unexpected because The Best Food Blog Ever is just a month old, and I have expended zero effort to publicize it. Other than a handful of friends, and the occasional visitor drawn to the site by Googling “best food blog”, the site doesn’t get many visitors on a day-to-day basis, and is very much under the radar.
So, a 1300% increase in visitors would naturally catch my attention. I checked, and most of them were coming from CNN. I was puzzled because I didn’t really consider our dinner party from last week to be breaking news, but then I pieced together what happened.
You see, The Best Food Blog Ever kind of started on CNN’s iReport website. I was intrigued when CNN launched their iReport citizen journalist site - pretty much, anyone who wants to submit “news” can do so, and it’s unmoderated and free. I really didn’t think it was unmoderated, so as a test I foraged through the Make Your Nut archives and posted a story entitled BREAKING - Woodland Creatures Eat Novice Gardener’s Summer Crop. It wasn’t fake news, it really did happen, but you can’t get more local than the happenings in my backyard. This was news that pretty much just interested me.
But the most ridiculous thing was, over 1,000 people read the story.
So, I started posting the weekly Thursday Lunch Report to iReport, and for the most part I did it for the lulz. Every week, on Thursday, I took a picture of what I was eating and threw together a recipe, and posted it to iReport. My omelet recipe has close to 1,700 views. Oddly enough, the Thursday Lunch Report was well received, even when I did the simplest of recipes like Eggs in a Basket. I even got a private message from an iReport producer (hi, Kate) praising my recipes, which was very cool in and of itself.
Having published Make Your Nut for over a year, I was already comfortable with writing on a regular schedule for a blog. So, a few weeks ago, I decided to turn the idea of the Thursday Lunch Report into a full fledged food blog, which is what you’re reading right now. Because my time and attention were now turned to developing two blogs, I stopped posting the Thursday Lunch Report.
Last week, I figured it would be the polite thing to do to drop a PM to Kate and the iReport folks to explain my absence, which provoked two reactions - one, an email from a different iReport producer (who, inexplicably, attempted to make my fried rice recipe without ginger, which is totally nutso and for which I disclaim all guarantee of results - he liked it anyway) telling me that he missed the Thursday Lunch Report, and two, this blog post from Kate on the official CNN iReport blog entitled “From iReport to Web Gourmand” talking up my new site.
It was the ultimate coolness, to be sure. But now I’m getting the guilts over not posting Thursday Lunch Reports, so I may have to drop a happy on them every once in a while.
You’ve Just Found The Best Food Blog Ever
…but not really, as you and I obviously know. This is just the first entry - so unless you judge websites by their cool random rotating header graphics and elegant use of white space, there’s really not much to go by here right now.
I have a hard time coming up with names for websites - all I knew was that I wanted to be at the helm of the best food blog ever, and, well…here we are, and now we’re going to live with it. At the very least, I haven’t had a revelatory moment at any time since registering the domain, and so domain name remorse has not yet visited itself upon me.
The way to think, then, about the Best Food Blog Ever is in the same ironic way that all Chinese restaurants call themselves #1 Golden Garden, or how car dealerships name themselves A-1 Motors. For some, this site really will be the best food blog ever no matter how pointless and awful it becomes, and for others it will never even approach readability despite my very best efforts. That’s just the way the internet rolls. There are some sites out there that are brilliantly crafted, consistently well-written, and intelligent, that somehow always fly under the radar, and there are others that I cannot for the life of me understand how they manage to maintain such high subscriber numbers.
My short term goal is to aim right for the middle.
So, here we are, at the dawn of yet another new blog. Those of you who have followed me here from Make Your Nut will already be familiar with my writing, and I thank you all for your loyal readership and welcome you to the new house. Those of you who have never read anything that I have written now, at this very point in time, have exactly three paragraphs from which to draw a first impression. You might as well click on the big orange RSS subscribe button now; you can always delete it later.
If you’re still here, that’s a good start. So, yes, welcome to the latest food blog. We live in Pennsylvania, so a fair amount of content - particularly restaurant talk, will be local. Great if you live here, good if you’re planning a visit, and considerably irrelevant if you are not part of Group A or Group B. Actually, since we don’t go out to eat all too often, I don’t envision alienating the lot of you with Philly talk all that much.
Also, and here’s a bit of personal philosophy here, I don’t believe in the word ‘gourmet’. I think it’s misleading and subjective, and in the end good food is good food. It doesn’t have to be expensive (but can be), or elaborate (but there’s nothing wrong with that), as long as a dish respects its ingredients and the person eating it. There’s as much beauty to be found in a wicked cheeseburger at a diner counter as there is in an upscale dish involving foie gras. Two sides, same coin.
Okay, here we go.
