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.  :-{)}

Restaurant review, Paragon Brewing, CDA Idaho

We went to Coeur d’ Alene for the dog show, and part of my assignment was to scout the area for interesting places to eat, of which there were many, one in particular that was so good it generated this review.

Government Way is a north-south road that connects CDA, as the locals call it, with Hayden Lake to the north as it parallels, and later crosses US 95 on the way to Sandpoint.  95 is the multi-laned main drag, and, as such, has become the location of choice for all the big chain restaurants and stores, which had the effect of putting many local establishments out of business and forcing the rest of them to survive by appealing to the local people who will know where to find them, and providing good food at reasonable prices, which makes the best of them into lucky finds for the inquisitive traveler who wants to get off the beaten track.  Paragon Brewing on Government Way between CDA and Hayden is one of those.

I had driven by and marked the spot mentally because of two things:  It was a brewpub featuring their own products, as well as other local microbrews, and it billed itself as an British style pub, which is just enough of an oddity in northern Idaho to call for a visit.  We came back on a Tuesday night after the dog show crowd had departed.

It’s a small place, log cabin style, with a gravel parking lot in back and stairs up to the outdoor seating area with rickety metal furniture and a great view of the vacant lot next door and the various auto shops and storage yards across the street.  Inside, the single room with much wood paneling was full of people, mostly families with children there for dinner, something we usually count as a good sign.  Typical of Idaho, the sign said, “If you are under 21, please do not sit at the bar”.  They were happy to let our dog sit with us on the outside patio, though I had to go back inside to read the beer list, which is written in chalk on a board above the bar, and changes every time a keg runs dry.

We started with a What the Helles Maibock for me and a Trickster’s Druid Stout for her, served with an appetizer of Scotch Eggs($8), two soft boiled eggs wrapped in sausage and deep fried, then served split on a plate with the yokes perfectly done.  The Maibock is a very nice bitter with a hint of IPA in the bite and and an ESB aftertaste that perfectly complemented the scotch eggs.  My only complaint was that the dog got too many treats that should have come to me instead.

Her Druid Stout was a leathery mocha influenced brown ale with perfect creamy head and wonderful quaffing ability served in a large stemmed oval glass that reflected the nose back at you with each hoist.  Then it was on to dinner.

I wiped out the Maibock, and chose a glass of Orlison’s Underground to accompany the main course. Orlison, it turns out, is the name of a brewery in Airway Heights, outside of Spokane.  Their motto is “Brew No Evil”.  The beer was a sublime brown ale, the type that, when it is first poured, entertains you for several minutes as you watch the cascading waves of creamy head fill the glass with golden bubbles that sink to the bottom and raise back up to reveal the black lager behind and below them as they resolve into a creamy head on top of your glass that still remains after the beer is gone.  Wonderful stuff.

The menu changes regularly, and each change Is reflected in a three course special offered in addition to the regular menu, from which you can pick and choose at will.

We regretfully passed on the Potted Trout appetizer and the Cornish Hen entrée, but could not pass up the Dessert Flight($10), of which more will be said later.  She chose the Pork Chop ($13), which came beer brined and Parmesan-panko breaded, accompanied by some delicious Pear Butter and a hefty pile of braised Brussels sprouts on a bed of barley risotto.  I had the Bangers($13), two smallish but excellent British style house-made fine grained sausages served on a scalloped potato galette covered with mushrooms and Scotch ale demi-glace, with a small metal pot of mushy peas on the side.  We both dove into our meals and came up in Nirvana, or some kind of foody heaven equivalent.  The mushy peas, which I had not previously encountered, were wonderful, seasoned with thyme and sage and whipped into a pudding that melts in your mouth, and the potato was just solid enough to hold its shape until my fork revealed its mashed intentions, as the sauce made my taste buds sing a song.

The pork chop was likewise perfectly done, and the combination of the risotto and the pear butter raised the overall experience to one you would expect at one of the finest French restaurants in Paris, or New York, but maybe not in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho.  We asked our Chef, who dropped by to see how we liked his work, where he learned his licks, and it turns out he is a veteran of a well known French restaurant in Pend Orielle.  Their loss was definitely our gain on this night.

And then we got to dessert, or, as they call it, Afters.  The flight came on a narrow plate with a small bowl of Urfa Biber spiced chocolate ice cream on one end.  In the middle was a beer-battered white chocolate and cardamom tablet, and on the end, half of a Mick Duff’s Pale Ale-poached Forelle pear.  Words cannot adequately express the feeling of joy that your taste buds impart when you cut off a chunk of the pear, add a nibble of the white chocolate and top that with a spoon of the ice cream.  I swear you can actually taste the individual grains of brown sugar as they melt into the ice cream while the pear adds cadence to the chocolate.  It was very close to a mystical experience. The dog got none of this.

Perhaps the best part of the meal was the thought that the two entrees were the most expensive items on the two-page menu.  That fits my definition of Local and Reasonable, indeed.  So if you find yourself in Coeur d’Alene one day, I urge you to go out on Government Way and look these folks up.  Your taste buds will be glad you did.  :-{)}