The Truth About Hooters' Famous Wings

Hooters may arguably be the most famous of the so-called "breastaurants," but believe it or not, the one thing that made the chain famous and drove the expansion of the restaurant from coast to coast doesn't happen to come wrapped in a pair of skintight bright orange booty shorts. While the revealing uniform with the plunging neckline may have grabbed all of the headlines when the chain was originally started in 1983, it's Hooters' signature chicken wings that have transformed the restaurant that started as a bit of a goof into a national institution.

Wings are serious business at Hooters, a chain otherwise known for its irreverence and lighthearted approach to family dining. While the uniforms may be silly, the chicken is anything but: Hooters devotes an enormous part of its menu to both classic wings and boneless versions, all drenched in their signature sauces. Though the chicken wing was once considered a throwaway scrap unfit for use in anything other than stocks and sauces, it's become so much more. Let's take a look at what sets the deep-fried wings at Hooters apart from their competitors.

Hooters seems to understand one of the core precepts of competing in the quick-service world of endlessly over-the-top limited time offerings, where restaurant chains feel the need to constantly outdo each other in their search for Instagrammable viral taste sensations. Unconfined by the hard limits of science, morality, and the natural world, Hooters recently introduced one of their most nightmarishly Cronenbergian creations yet: The stuffed wing.

"Oh, sure," we can hear you saying, "They probably just figured out a way to stuff wings with melted cheese, or chopped up jalapeños... big deal." But to you, we say, "nay." Figuring out how to take a part of the chicken that isn't blessed with a natural cavity of its own and cram fistfuls of even more fattening food into it was only the beginning. Hooters pushed the concept to gut-punishing new levels, with the introduction of "Cajun Jamabalaya" and "Zesty Chorizo" variations of its game-changing invention.

After a successful test run in Fort Meyers, Florida in 2018, Hooters' new stuffed wings began a rollout to the national menu in 2019 (though they're only available at participating locations). So if you've always dreamed of biting into a crispy wing and having grains of boiling-hot sausagy rice explode all over your chin, your day has (finally!) arrived.

Baseball season? Meh. The Super Bowl? We guess the commercials are okay. But when it comes to the pure, unadulterated adrenaline of watching world-class athletes at the top of their game, pitted head-to-head against their rivals in a carefully choreographed battle royale, there's no sport we love quite as much as competitive eating. Sure, some people get a thrill out of seeing 400 pound gladiators on the gridiron crashing into each other head first. But we'll take a 135 pound guy downing 74 soggy water-dunked hot dogs in the blistering Brooklyn summer sun any day.

Sweet corn. Mutton. Tacos. Moon Pies. Crawfish. Tamales. If you can eat it, then chances are, there's a contest that will allow you to eat it to excess, and potentially win a boatload of cash at the same time. And just like these other categories of gastronomic excess, there's even a "Hooters Worldwide Wing Eating" category for competitors to go head-to-head (and belly-to-belly) against other top "athletes" in the field. In 2017, upstart Geoffrey Esper caused a major upset when he unseated defending champion Matt Stonie by eating 250(!) of Hooters' famous wings in just 10 minutes, earning a cash prize of $8,500 and worldwide glory, admiration, and acclaim in the process.

The American holiday calendar is filled with occasions to eat gluttonous amounts of not-so-good for you food, from Thanksgiving turkey dinners so large that they make us involuntarily fall asleep on the couch afterward, to great heaping bowls of pickled beef on St. Patrick's Day. But none of these overstuffed holidays can hold a candle to the biggest, unhealthiest eating holiday of all: Super Bowl Sunday.

It's the one day a year that we collectively completely abandon any sense of portion control or reasonable food choices. We eat huge bowls of spicy liquefied cheese, deep-fry the pants off of every food we can think of, and wash it all down with gallons of fizzy domestic beer. Hell, we even build entire miniature football stadiums entirely out of lunch meat.

Game day is a huge moneymaker for nearly any bar or restaurant, but if your specialty happens to be combining "Buffalo wings" with "big screen televisions" and "butts," you can earn enough in one day to positively impact your restaurant's bottom line for months.

Hooters gets ready for the onslaught of hungry Super Bowl customers early each year, when their average sales increase by 167 percent. To accommodate all of those ravenous football fans, each location of the chain orders 22,000 more wings than usual, 20 more gallons of blue cheese, and 10 more gallons of ranch.

There's a reason that Buffalo wing flavoring has caught on in a big way, and is now being used to season everything from potato chips to Hot Pockets. In its original preparation, it's a deceptively simple recipe: Frank's Red Hot sauce, and a whole lot of butter. But this is one recipe where the finished product is so much more than the sum of its parts: You get the throat-burning spice from the hot sauce, along with the heavy hit of hot airborne vinegar that penetrates your sinuses and opens your pores, both balanced by the velvety richness of the fatty butter that enrobes each crispy wing.

Hooters offers four heat variations on this classic formula, ranging from "Medium" to "9-1-1." But for the truly adventurous, the options don't stop there. Hooters also offers additional taste sensations including Hot Chipotle BBQ, Honey Thai Chili Pepper, and Chipotle Garlic. There are even versions of the chain's famous wings that are finished on a hot grill, slow-smoked, or even wrapped in bacon and grilled.

Okay, so maybe you're still blushing at the thought of dining at a Hooters, and you don't want to muck around with a gallon of boiling fryer oil to make them yourself at home. What's a lonely (and hungry) customer to do?

Hooters has been aggressively expanding their delivery options for customers who may be craving Buffalo wings, but who may not necessarily want to put on pants and brave the entire Hooters experience. According to a quote in the New York Post, Hooters Chief Executive Terry Marks sees delivery as a big part of the chain's future. "Many people wouldn't step foot in our restaurants, but they want our product," Marks said. "Delivery [solves] the polarizing issue the brand has had."

But can a restaurant that's built its business largely on the appeal of a few hours of risk-free ogling really expect to survive once that element is removed from the equation? We'll just have to wait and see.