The Wing Rating System

We chose our list of restaurants from known famous chicken wing establishments, wing restaurants previously ranked in other wing contests, and word-of-mouth from friends and family of their favorite wing joint. Check out our References for more info.

For consistency, we always ordered 10 medium traditional Buffalo wings (unless the restaurant didn’t offer 10, then we ordered as close a number as possible... but honestly why do some restaurants serve 9 or even 8 wings? That's just weird...). We ranked each of the tastings as follows on a 1 to 5 scale.

Rating Categories

1) Restaurant

• General look and feel, cleanliness, service, overall menu and food; willingness to return and bring guests back for an iconic and memorable Buffalo wing experience

2) Taste

• The overall impression of the wings; bleu cheese and celery are expected; carrots optional

3) Buffalo Sauce

• Closeness to medium heat level; trio balance of creaminess, acidity, and spicy flavor; quantity of sauce

4) Crispiness

• Crispy exterior; chicken meat is succulent and pulls away from the bone cleanly without clinging; the wing is neither gummy nor dry and is cooked consistently

5) Size & Quality

• Uniformity of wing sizes; not too small but not mutantly large; quality and consistency of drums & flats; ideally looking for an equal ratio of drums to flats

Rating Key

• ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ - 😍Exceptional, addiction-level deliciousness
• ⭐⭐⭐⭐ - 😃Very good, well executed but missing some key aspects
• ⭐⭐⭐ - 🙂Good, solid but not outstanding nor memorable
• ⭐⭐ - 😐Fair, pretty okay but missing some major key aspects
• ⭐ - 😢Poor, would rather have something else on the menu entirely

Photography Notes 

• All photos for every rating were taken as soon as the wings arrived at our table
• Wings were not touched nor re-arranged in any way before photos were taken - we wanted to capture exactly how each restaurant presented their wings
• The exact same editing filter was applied to each photo for maximum deliciousness viewing (let’s face it, some Buffalo dive bars are really dark inside and we needed to adjust the lighting)