Restaurant Review - Wingstop

January 6, 2017

Now I have always thought highly of Richard Sherman, ever since he came out of Stanford University to the Seahawks.  Because of our son’s experience there, we know how they prepare students to take their places on the world stage and make something happen, and we’ve seen it over and over.

So when we heard that Richard had joined a partnership in a new restaurant based on various types of chicken wings, we put it on the back burner as something to check out.

Well, be that as it may, my fellow intrepid explorer of the depths of White Center, Marty Etquibal, and I were footloose and fancy free today, and decided the time was ripe for a venture into the wilds of Westwood Village, where the one and only WingStop holds forth on a pedestrian corner between Sleep Country and the 24 hour fitness joint (motto:  Come work out here, then pig out on some wings on the way out!).

We’re here to join forces and tell you, don’t.  Much as it pains me to pan anything with Richard Sherman’s name attached, if invisibly or in any other way, I must in all honestly rain a reality blast down on this particular endeavor, and tell my friends, “Don’t go there.”

Philosophically, I realize that you can not critique the entire menu of any given restaurant  without eating there many times, to allow for hidden gems in the menu.  It’s like, when the nurse asks you, “are you allergic to any medications?” all you can say is, “Well, I haven’t taken them all yet, so I can’t rightly say… got any you want me to try?”

In this case, such hope is soon dashed, and the clues that shout themselves as you walk in the door are undeniable.  First, it’s the middle of rush hour, and the place is empty.  There’s exactly one other person inside, and she’s from the Post Office, so she’s probably on break.

The décor is heavy on fast food chic mixed with IKEA frills, with great views out into the empty parking lot and vacant sidewalks.  The menu is brief, very brief, and really only wants to know one thing:  boneless, or boned?  There are lots of sides available, but it really boils down to what kind of sauce you want on your wings?

I ordered the combo in bone with French fries and smoky barbecue sauce, while Marty asked for the same sauce over boneless wings, with potato salad on the side.  We both got a tall paper cup to fill at the fountain, which surprisingly contained no diet sodas, or even water.   I poured a cup of ice and waited for it to melt, and talked into it to speed up the process.

It took a surprising amount of time to prepare two small orders in an empty restaurant, but my ice was not even half melted when we dug in.  That was where reality set in.

The barbecue sauce was unmistakably none other than Sweet Baby Ray’s, off the shelf at Costco, and I would swear to that on a stack of the wimpy brown paper towels they supply for napkins, which is unfortunate, because they dump enough sauce on the poor wings  for you to eat your lunch three times over and still make chili with the leftovers.  The boneless wings turned out to be the most severely over-breaded Chicken Un-Tenders out of those 47 pound bags of thrice frozen remnants with the Foster Farms label in the Costco bulk foods section.    And Oh, Look, over there the huge tubs of Kirkland potato salad look just like the formless wad served to Marty in an overstuffed paper tub, probably less than a week old.  At least the bony chicken wings had real meat on them, all six of them for $10, I must grant that.  The “boneless” wings could have well included some tofu, if not a lot of beak parts, not that you could tell under all that breading.  My fries were good, until I ate one and discovered they were covered in toxic levels of sodium chloride.  At least they were real potatos.

To sum up, the Wing Stop restaurant is a prime candidate for a new reality show, “Costo Gone Wild”, but not one that we can recommend for our friends or any other discerning palates.  If you feel piqued by this, if your hopes were dashed because you were thinking the same thing as me but hadn’t found the place yet, feel free to check for yourself.  I’d suggest soon, though, restaurants that are empty at lunchtime are soon empty all the time.  Marty and I deserve a medal of some sort for exposing ourselves to this experience, so you don’t have to… urp.  :-{)}