1,000 WING FLAVORS! WE DID IT!

“The wing is a blank canvas. The possibilities are endless."

If you’ve been following the Wingaddicts at all, you might know that we’ve been on a journey to eat 1,000 different chicken wing flavors since we started up in February 2020. Yeah. A thousand! 

Certainly no mere mortal has ever accomplished the feat. Well, not until now! 

Most average human beings think of the Classic Buffalo flavor when they think about wings. That’s the hot sauce and butter flavor invented in Buffalo sixty years ago. Most have also  tried other basic flavors along the way, such as Garlic Parmesan, BBQ, Teriyaki or Honey Mustard. 

But as much as we love the traditional Buffalo-flavored wing, it’s like getting a plain cheese pizza every time out. There needs to be variety, and we decided to head up a mission to encourage other wing lovers like us to “spread their wings.” We’re pleased to notice that it’s been catching on.

We got the idea when we saw a teenager posting that he had eaten all 130-some flavors on the wing menu at the legendary Dew Drop Inn, in Derby, CT. We thought that sounded insane. 

That was then.

So for five years running, we’ve been documenting and posting photos and videos to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube sharing some of the most-ridiculous sounding wing flavor combos you could imagine. Most were damned good!

It ultimately took us 1,825 days which amounts to a brand new flavor every two days for five years! And we capped off our quest with THE most-fabulous flavor of all time, custom prepared for us by our friends at The Blind Rhino in Connecticut. 

Wing flavor number 1,000 was a plate of 24k Gold White Truffle wings! And it was the perfect exclamation point on what has been an exciting journey of discovery!

Looking back upon our files we found it interesting that we’ve eaten 75 different flavors specifically from Dew Drop Inn. We’ve had 74 flavors at Groggy Frogg in Southington, CT, we’ve had 44 from The Hub in Naugatuck, 26 at TK’s in Danbury, 21 from Blind Rhino and we’ve created 135 at home with Wingaddicts Home Cookin’! The other 625 flavors came from a combination of another 400 restaurants and wing festivals around the country. Clearly we’ve had multiple flavors, multiple times as well.

As you can imagine, it's now difficult to walk into a restaurant and see a wing flavor on a menu that we haven't had yet. And we've had some crazy ones!! Here are a few distinctive flavors we've had over the final few months. 

So now what? 

Completing our journey came with a (pun intended) bitter sweet flavor. We didn’t want to leave the restaurant. It was like winning the Super Bowl and not knowing what to do afterward. “I’m going to Disneyland?” Do they have wings there?

“Will you guys stop now?” one restaurant patron asked us as we toasted victory one last time. Well, I suppose not. Three days later we were judges at the Hudson Valley Wingfest in Poughkeepsie, NY where we ran that total all the way up to 1,020 in one day!

While the focus will come off the wing count now, the quest to seek out great wings and wing joints all over the world will continue. Onward and upward!

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* Examine our alphabetical flavor list here on wingaddicts.com and let us know what we’ve missed! And please follow our Instagram account @wingaddcts to actually SEE every photo and video reel of each and every one! 

Tommy Wyatt is co-founder of Wingaddicts and author of  this “Under the Wingfluence" blog. He can be reached directly by email at tommy@wingaddicts.com 

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