: Ba Bars wings and sides.
  • Kelly O
  • Ba Bar's wings and sides.

The story of the buffalo wing is a story of triumph. Someone in Buffalo, New York, in the middle of the last century—accounts of the creator's identity vary—discovered a use for a chicken part that had traditionally been trashed or humbly reserved for stock or industrial food purposes. And the use they found for the ugly old wings that everyone else tossed out? Slather them in butter and hot sauce, and serve them with blue cheese and an entire roll of paper towels, preferably in the middle of a large and raucous sporting event. From garbage to beloved snack in a matter of decades? That's American ingenuity at its finest!

I'm not a sports fan at all—at all—but Super Bowl season always instills in me a deep-seated craving for a good, sloppy plate of buffalo wings. A table full of people eating wings is never pretty: faces and hands smeared with a hyperactive orange sauce, trays of small, slick bones everywhere, plugs of juicy meat dipped into a cheese sauce that dribbles, inevitably, everywhere, and mountains of crumpled paper towels growing higher by the second, punctuated by thirsty gulps from greasy glasses of beer. Aesthetically, it's a nightmare. But the symphony of clashing flavors that somehow build to a perfectly balanced experience is a very specific itch that can only be scratched in one very specific way.

If you're thinking about eating buffalo wings in Seattle, one name dominates the conversation: Wing Dome. The local chain—despite the corporate feel, Wing Dome's only branches are in Kirkland, Kent, and Greenwood—has branded itself as virtually the only buffalo-wing expert in the region. A lunchtime visit to the Greenwood location affirmed that they've certainly got the trappings of a wing place down...

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