Clucked Up Maybe Chickens Can’t Fly, But Chicken Profits Are Soaring
By Tad Wilkes
OK. Let’s lay a simple truth out there up front: Buffalo wings and
chicken tenders anchor a bar menu. It’s cut and dried. Or cut and
fried, rather. Patrons expect these two chicken standards, among other
finger foods.
That being said, with every corner bar offering some form of wings and
tenders, the key has become for operators to set theirs apart from the
pack. Every operator with soggy, tasteless tenders is giving his
competitor a golden opportunity to do it right and offer a more
attractive signature item.
An American Staple
The wide-reaching sway of Buffalo Wings owes its power to its appeal to
bar patrons of every social class. At least, that’s the theory Ira Levy
started with and has proved with eight successful locations throughout
Maryland.
“I loved wings, and I loved sports, and there wasn’t a true concept
that people from white collar to blue collar could come in and be
comfortable and be themselves,” Levy says. The answer? Levy opened the
perfectly dubbed Buffalo Wings & Beer in Gaithersburg, Md.
Neither a chicken nor a Buffalo can fly, but the wings have been taking
flight to higher eschelons of profit since their creation in 1966.
Levy, in business 10 years, now says he does a staggering five tons of
wings a week across his eight locations.
“Buffalo wings are the second largest product on Super Bowl Sunday,
right behind pizza, so it’s definitely a staple,” Levy says. “It became
a fad and a trend as an appetizer and now a main meal. There are so
many competitors with concepts built around wings.”
High Margin
If the rampant popularity of the staple wings doesn’t make putting them on a menu a no-brainer, consider the profit margin.
“Wings, when they first started were almost 90 cents less (per pound),”
Levy says. “It’s almost gone up 10 cents a year on average. The supply
and demand has grown tremendously in the past decade, but the profit
margin in the wing, by the piece or by the pound, definitely is more
significant than any other trend appetizer that’s out there, including
probably the French fry.
“That’s why it’s grown past the side to be a main dish — because it’s profitable.”
Levy uses 100 percent fresh wings. Actually, they are flash frozen,
which still is considered fresh. “The blood inside the marrow in the
bone has not been killed,” Levy says. “When you freeze it, you kill the
blood, and when you cook (a frozen wing) in the fryer, the bone marrow
and the bone ends are black. You can tell immediately if it’s a frozen
product or a fresh product.”
Frozen wings can make financial sense when they are but one appetizer
in a much broader mix of offerings. But Levy says using fresh chicken
is crucial at Buffalo Wings & Beer, where the wings take center
stage.
“Sometimes the better deal on the front end is not going to be as
successful on the back end of the longevity of your concept,” Levy
says. “The larger the product, you lose your vitamins and minerals, and
also, it gets tougher, and it’s not enjoyable. You have to pick a
certain size of wing product that you feel comfortable that you can
produce in a timely fashion and get out to your customers in a timely
fashion and make it consistently enjoyable, day in and day out. I
believe the 10 or 12 count is the count you need to use, at 320 degrees
for 10 minutes.” Levy uses vegetable oil and a 35-pound gas fryer.
“It should be fresh,” says David VanDenburgh, chef at Old Town Bar in
New York, which The Village Voice named as having the Best Buffalo
Wings in the city. “And our customers like a smaller, petite chicken
wing. It cooks a little bit easier and faster and cooks all the way
through.
“If you go to an 8 to 10 count, and you cook one pound of wings, it
might be okay, but if you cook five pounds of wings, they’re not all
the way cooked, and you’ve got to take 15 to 17 total minutes. Your
consistency and turnaround time — nothing is going to turn out right.”
‘When
you’re experimenting with making your sauce, you’ve got to eat a lot of
wings with it, because it’s when it’s applied to the chicken, that’s
where you want the flavor.’
— David VanDenburgh, chef, Old Town Bar, New York
Saucing and Dipping
“You’ve got to come up with a good base sauce,” VanDenburgh says. “You
can always add heat to it, but you can’t take the heat out. And when
you’re experimenting with making your sauce, you’ve got to eat a lot of
wings with it, because it’s when it’s applied to the chicken, that’s
where you want the flavor. A stand-alone sauce might be great by
itself, but it might not give the effect that you want when you’ve
actually put it on the wing.”
When it comes to saucing wings and dipping them, everything must stick,
Levy says, to meet customer expectations. Upon coming out of the fryer,
the wings at Buffalo Wings & Beer go into a particular bucket of
sauce, with a certain amount of sauce per pound and then are shaken in
the bucket and distributed onto one-, two- and five-pound plates.
“I believe the blue cheese or ranch dressing, when you dip a wing, it
needs to adhere to the wing itself,” Levy says. “The sauce adheres to
the wing, the dressing adheres to the sauce of the wing. You don’t want
it runny like salad dressing. The majority of (bars offering wings)
have chunky, thick dressing. It absolutely stays on the wing itself.
You want to taste a little bit of the sauce, a little bit of the wing
and a little bit of the dressing in every bite.”
The Buffalo Wings & Beer menu offers orders from one pound to 500 pounds.
Tender is the Night
In recent years, the Buffalo flavor has embraced consumers wary of
eating anything with a bone in it. To be sure, it’s no news that
“boneless Buffalo Wings” — i.e., Buffalo-sauced Chicken Tenders that
aren’t wings at all — have come to the fore as a major player on bar
menus. But the rub is in doing it right, as opertors with high sales
attest.
“There definitely is a big demand for a boneless product,” says James
Marathas, owner of Centerfield’s sports bar in Boston. As proof,
Marathas cites the roughly 400 pounds of tenders sold weekly in three
Centerfield’s locations.
“We use a Buffalo sauce and a fresh chicken tender,” he says. “We don’t use a frozen product.”
Years of experience with many chefs led to the selection of
Centerfield’s recipe for Buffalo sauce. “After 10 years, I think we’ve
got it down.” NCB
The wide-reaching sway of Buffalo Wings owes its power to its appeal to
bar patrons of every social class. At least, that’s the theory Ira Levy
started with and has proved with eight successful locations throughout
Maryland.
