“I’m Thinking Wingstop”: Eating at a restaurant because Rick Ross told us to
Trill wings for a Trilla MC.
When The A.V. Club found out that the national wings chain Wingstop (1234 Regent St.) would be returning to Madison following a short run in 2009 (the old West Side location closed, and is now a Harold’s Chicken), we knew we had to get our asses there as soon as possible. Why? Certainly not because of perpetually concussed national spokesman Troy Aikman: We needed to get to Wingstop and try the chicken because of Rick Ross.
For those of you who don’t spend significant time on the rap blogs where Ross is most famous, he’s the rotund rapper who routinely shows up to music videos in a weird kimono jacket and refuses to zip it up, despite looking like this. Ross is famous for the time he spent as a real-life prison guard, which stands in stark contrast to the persona of the Miami drug kingpin he has cultivated on his four solo albums.
So what does this have to do with Wingstop? Well, we might not be able to trust Ross to tell the truth about his prison work, or to be able to make it through an interview with GQ without taking a break to hook up with a groupie, but we feel like we can trust him when it comes to wings. He certainly looks like he eats well, and in his magnum opus, “MC Hammer,” he says:
She thinking Phillipe’s / I’m thinking Wingstop / Fiending lemon pepper / I got my thing cocked.
This is Ross saying that, though he has the means to take a woman to a nice restaurant (later he talks about taking a woman to Mexico solely for purposes of nonconventional sex), he’d rather head to Wingstop. If someone calling himself the Teflon Don chooses Wingstop over every other restaurant, the place must be the best. Ross loves Wingstop so much, he’s even opening franchises of his own. So we took our profits from selling that Archie Bunker (we do not sell cocaine) down to the recently opened Wingstop to feed our own fiending for lemon pepper.
The Wingstop
Upon entering the little space filled up by Wingstop—it used to be a Taco John’s, and most recently, Palis Café—we were sort of disappointed. We expected—misguidedly—an opulent environment, like the kind found in Ross’ ridonkulous music videos. This is, after all, a man who named his record label Maybach Music Group, after the idiotically expensive German luxury car. Instead, it was just a regular, boring-ass wings restaurant, with some tables, a counter, and some TVs. Ross might be a man of wealth, but he’s got cheap tastes.
At least we didn’t need to get Deeper Than Rap to choose our food: We knew we wouldn’t need much time to pick flavors. Like Meek Mill, we followed Ross’ lead, and ordered up five lemon pepper boneless wings. We didn’t go the full 10, however. We predicted—correctly—that Ross’ chosen spiciness would be too much for our delicate, non-Trilla digestive systems. But it turns out the Bawse isn’t as indestructible as we all assume: His chosen spice is in the bottom half of Wingstop’s nine-flavor tower of colon destruction. He’s not so weak he needs to eat teriyaki, and he’s manlier than an order of garlic parmesan (which was what we had for our other five). Our combo came with a drink and a monstrous order of fries that were actually the best part of the meal. We wholeheartedly endorse Wingstop’s fries as the best we’ve had in a fast-food environment.
The quality of the wings was just like that of wings from anywhere else. There was some chicken, and it was cooked reasonably well. The chicken was plentiful, and so was the seasoning: Our meal ended with the very real option of doing a line of white powder—garlic parmesan powder, that is. But the dry seasoning flavors are what sets Wingstop’s fare apart from the sauce-drowned wings found elsewhere in town. We haven’t had much experience having our lips go numb thanks to some dry seasoning at Buffalo Wild Wings, that’s for sure.
In the end, Ross’ endorsement of Wingstop probably falls into the same category as his shrewd business choice in suddenly deciding that Pill is a great rapper. Wingstop certainly offers a very okay wings experience, but it isn’t the transcendent wing experience we assumed it would be. There were no piles of money, no shirtless and belly-tattooed jokers shouting stuff at us, no surprise DJ Khaled guest appearance, and no fancifully dressed people eating at Wingstop instead of at a classy restaurant.
But you sort of have to admire the ambition of name-checking a chain restaurant in a song, and then becoming a franchiser a year later. And if nothing else, Rawse got us out to a new restaurant in our town, which is more than we can say for any 50 Cent album.
