Chicken Wings in Central Wisconsin

“Are you going to drive 100 miles for a hamburger!?” I hear this a lot back in Central Wisconsin. Sometimes I feel people are joking, but since I hear it so often it feels more like a taunt. It seems some people can’t fathom that there’s a world outside of their small area and things may be done differently. A lot can change in 100 miles, including how a hamburger (or chicken wings) are done. In Central Wisconsin, chicken wings are done completely differently than it appears the rest of the country and even Canada do. I didn’t realize this until I was doing the Lake Superior Circle Tour and had ordered some wings at On Deck. I texted Victoria, “Look at this! They do wings differently in Canada.” I then sent her this picture:



She texted me back confused and asked me what I was talking about. I told her the sauce was already on the wing and not on the side to dip it in. After texting back and forth, I found it wasn’t Canada (or the rest of North America) that did wings differently, it was actually Central Wisconsin. I had just grown accustomed to how wings were done there, so seeing sauce-coated wings stood out to me. In Central Wisconsin, wings don’t come with sauce on them. They come like a small piece of fried chicken.



You then either order your sauce or some places like Five-O-One Sports Bar (A place I used to get wings almost weekly when I lived in Marshfield, Wisconsin and where the next pictures were taken), bring out a sauce caddy with around 8 different sauces.






You then put sauce on the plate and dip it in the sauce like you would a chicken nugget.



You can effectively load up on as many sauces as you want.



It took me traveling more than 100 miles to realize that the way chicken wings are done is different. This is one of the reasons I love to travel. There’s a million different ways to do things and no single way is right or wrong. In the case of chicken wings, you can still get the great flavor of wings with sauce. In Central Wisconsin, you just have to dip them in the sauce instead of them coming coated.