Late Night Munchies Never Tasted So Good

Late-night pizza delivery has some new competition: chicken wings.

Wing It, the Allston restaurant which delivers wings to campus in about 30 minutes, provides Cambridge and Boston residents with a new late-night snack food that you can't find at Store 24, Christy's or the nearby pizza parlor. In about three bits, you can down one of these tasty morsels of chicken dipped in one of ten different sauces.

Started a few months ago by two 1986 graduates of the University of Massachusetts, Wing It serves about ten different flavors of wings, including Buffalo-style, barbecue, and teriyaki.

The founders, Raymond G. Mello and Stephen W. Cavanaugh, says that the two decided to start a chicken wing restaurant in Boston after they tried the concept out in New York City. "We were sick of pizza," Mello says.

Now "we go through a ton of chicken a week," Mello says, adding that 40 percent of his customers are Harvard students. Buffalo-style medium-hot wings go the fastest, Mello says. Business doubles every month, and Mello and Cavanaugh hope to open a branch in Kenmore Square by next September, the former adds.

On the average night, orders get larger the later people request the wings, Mello says, because people ordering food tend to get drunker and drunker. One late night, he recalls, "everyone calling us up was incoherent."

Wing-aholics

The founders say that they can tell chicken wing gourmets from novices. "The connoiseurs order suicide [extra-hot] wings. We make those special to order," Mello says. "We had one guy who ordered 100 pounds of suicide wings for him and four of his friends," he adds. "They had a contest to see who could eat the most. And they ordered 10 pounds of ice cream to go down with it."

While Harvard students tend not to engage in Wing-Olympics, some have eschewed their love of pizza to join the winging-it craze. "It really fills you up more than pizza. Tastes better, too," says Matthews Hall resident Jerome D. Chao '90. "We've switched over to the wings completely."

"They're really good," says Christopher W. Marx '89, a Winthrop House patron. "We get chicken wings more than pizza now."

Students disagree over whether wings are a better deal than 'za. A two-pound order of the wings costs $4.85 and contains about 20 wings, while a 16-inch cheese pizza runs about $7.00 from Pizza Wheel and Pizza Ring, who also deliver to campus.

"Chicken wings are a better deal than pizza," says Marc E. Mani '90, Chao's floor mate in Masachusetts Hall. "It seems you pay a lot for pizza and you just don't get that much. [Pizza] is just not as substantial."

But Jeffrey S. Levy '86, a first-year law student, says, "It's way too expensive. It's much more expensive than a couple of slices of pizza." Wings come in three basic sizes: a two-pound order costs $4.85, a four-pounder costs $9.30, and six pounds of chicken is $13.50.

Edward n. Cooper '89 says he loves the chicken wings, but "you kind of lose your addiction when you see how much it costs."

Others say that the chicken wings just aren't worth the money and say that in fact the food is, well, downright fowl. Elke Z. Baker '90 says, "They're not worth the trouble. You have to go through skin and bones to get the meat."

"They're much more complicated than pizza," says Eliot House resident Ray F. Price '89. "There's all those bones and everything and that's not happening at 3 a.m. when you've got a paper."

But Are They Authentic?

Buffalo, N.Y. is the acknowledged world capital of chicken wings. Wing It claims to serve Buffalo-style wings, but Buffalo native Christopher P. Schaeffer '90 says that Boston's version is just not the same.

"As far as taste, they are good. As far as calling them Buffalo-style chicken wings, they don't quite cut it," Schaeffer says. "If you want real Buffalo wings, you have to go to Buffalo" where the wings are "hot enough you don't even taste the wing."