Fast Food Review: Spicy Chipotle Boneless Wings at Wendy's

Boneless wings are bullshit.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest right upfront. Nothing personal to the heirs of the late Dave Thomas, but despite the fact that Budweiser hails the nameless “Mr. Boneless Buffalo Wing Inventor” as one of their Real Men of Genius, the truth is that these things are a lie. Boneless “wings” contain breast meat. Only someone who has never eaten a whole chicken before could possibly mistake that for wing meat. They're even more deceptive than the places that have “wings” on the menu but then only serve you drumettes, leaving out the essential lower part of the wing (which is better) and the tip, which can occasionally contain a tiny bit of crunchy goodness worth nibbling.

Wings are wings. Breasts are breasts. One is not the other. If actual angels could be proven to exist, and we could have sex with them, this would go without saying. In reference to chicken, though, the boundaries apparently don’t matter.

 

(strangely, Wendy's website only has half a picture, as seen above. Maybe because they aren't wholly wings?)

As a critic, I believe in laying my biases out upfront, just so you know where I stand before I assess the item in question. So, Wendy’s version of the boneless wings includes, or at least in my case included, eight fried-and-battered pieces of all-breast meat chicken, put in a plastic container with generous squirtings of sauce, and then shaken by hand till they’re soaked in it. There are multiple available flavors, but the newest one is Spicy Chipotle. And it isn’t like any other chipotle out there.

I know chipotle refers to smoked peppers, but the fact of the matter is that so far, most fast food chains have had an unspoken agreement that any sauce called “chipotle” will be a creamy, mayo-based sauce (Del Taco muddies the waters by calling theirs Ancho sauce). Wendy’s ain’t playing that game. This sauce is the consistency of ketchup, with an instant burn rather than a subtle spiciness. It’s also slightly sweet, as though some syrup was mixed in to even it out. Think of the orange chicken at Panda Express, and imagine the sweetness-to-spiciness ratio reversed.

(I realize the odds of you being a frequent fast food eater and conceptualizing flavor notions into mathematical ratios are, shall we say, slightly stacked. So if you resemble that remark, picture burning ketchup with added syrup. Wendy’s says “amber honey,” but it tastes more like corn syrup to me, whether or not it actually is.)

The sauce is generous. So generous you can cover the chicken pieces in it and they still swim in the stuff. With that said, I got tired of the sauce by the time I was done with the chicken, and, though I had been dipping my 99-cent double-stack into it, gradually gave up on that idea. This is a sauce that I think would work better as a dipping sauce rather than a drenching one. That would also mitigate the slipperiness and messiness of these things. The meat inside is tender and nice. It just isn’t wing meat, and these are not wings.

Interesting to note that you can get ten of Wendy’s chicken nuggets for the same price, with dipping sauces. And they’re arguably the second-best fast food nuggets in existence, after the original McDonald’s McNuggets.

Except, wait a sec: 10-piece nuggets combo meal (w/fries and a drink) for $5.99...yet an order of 5 nuggets is on the 99-cent value menu? Something not right with that.

Back to the boneless wings, though...I feel like they’re neither here nor there. Add peppers and onions, put them on rice, and you’d have a decent AmerAsian style entrée. Make them actual wings with sauce on the side, and you’d have good hot wings. Buffalo wings, originally named such because they were invented in Buffalo, NY, have always sounded like something that could soar and kick up some dirt. These are more like penguin wings...not bad for appearances, but they’ll never really fly.

 

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