We visited Buffalo Wings & Things after reading an article written in March,
2005 in the Cincinnati Inquirer about the chain. At the time of the article,
they had six locations in the Cincinnati area. By the time we looked in the
phone book, they were down to two locations. Apparently, Buffalo Wild Wings has
taken a large portion of their former business.
We ordered the X-hot wings with an extra cup of X-hot sauce to dip into. We
requested extra crisp wings, as usual. We had to pay extra to get the X-hot
variety, and extra for the celery and blue cheese. We also ordered fries.
We noticed that they had cheap Monarch brand ketchup on the table. Although
we use Red Gold® Ketchup at home, our standard for restaurant ketchup has always
been Heinz Ketchup. We felt cheated before the food arrived at the table.
We were stunned when they brought the fries out to the table 10 minutes
ahead of the wings. We were hoping to use the fries to cool down from the heat
of the wings, but were forced to start eating fries right away because we were
afraid the fries would be cold before the wings ever arrived at the table.
The curly fries were VERY average – nothing to write home about. The
combination of average fries and inferior ketchup leads us to believe that the 2
locations in Cincinnati will probably be reduced to zero locations before the
end of 2005.
The wings finally arrived at the table, and we noticed that they were almost
swimming in the sauce. We wouldn’t have ordered the cup of dipping sauce for 79
cents if we had known the wings would be swimming.
They did understand extra-crisp, which was a good thing since the wings were
on the borderline of being just too large. The sauce tasted good, but was way
too salty and not hot enough to be a major player in the extra-hot market.
The whole experience led us to understand this concept's shrinking number of
restaurants. We don't plan a follow-up visit and recommend that you do the
same.