KNOWN FOR
- Wings
POPULAR
- Hot & Honey Sauce
BUZZ
- Greek Rub (1/10)
- Cajun Rub
- Beer Sauce (2/10)
I ALSO TRIED
- Smokin' Hot Sauce (2/10)
- Fries (3/10)
Wowza! I could still feel the burn on my lips and tongue! Prepare to drink lots of water, because it's really.......SALTY! EVERYTHING WAS! Guess I'm the first hater here, huh? I don't know if it was just an off day, because 33 reviews @ 4.5 stars is pretty good! Since all I really had were wings, let me break it down and talk about the wings first.
WINGS & BONELESS WINGS (Meat)
In a word, dry. The dry rub made the skin all crispy and crunchy, but the inside of the meat was dry. It wasn't like desert dry, but it was dry enough that you noticed it as kinda brittle in your mouth. The ones with sauce masked it a little bit, because it sort of added its own moisture to it, but the sauceless ones were noticeably dry. The size is "bigger than tiny." When I was a kid, I used to get the bag of Tyson's Buffalo Wings that you could microwave. The bone in wings are that same size.
The boneless wings are worse, because you actually have more meat, so more of it's dry. Even though it was doused in sauce, it wasn't enough to make up for it. The skin on the boneless was lightly crispy, but not very substantial, nothing even close to Buffalo Wild Wings' super crunchy boneless wings, which are probably my favorite. They're about the same size as Buffalo Wild Wings' boneless.
FRIES
Before I ate any wings, I decided to start up and clear my pallet with a french fry. They were yellow-gold, which usually means they're not very crispy, but to my surprise, I bit through one, and was very delighted at the strong crisp. But then the tastes registered in my brain, and suddenly, it was nasty, because it was so damn salty! No more of that!
GREEK RUB
Fries were salty, but now onto the chicken! I take a bite,and the skin is super crispy, practically crunchy, which was great. I'm looking for this garlic flavor that I was told it had, and you know what? It wasn't there, but instead, MORE FREAKING SALT! It was so salty, it made the fries seem normal. There was obviously an overpowering of salt, and I couldn't really enjoy any other seasoning. However, worse than the other two, there was no real special flavor. It just tasted like salty, crispy, dry, chicken. Ok, there was a really really faint flavor of something, but nothing I really wanted to take more salty bites of to find out.
BEER SAUCE
I got these in boneless. I took a bite, and was instantly saddened at the lack of crunch on the outer breading. It was just barely crispy, almost chewy, but the dry meat had more to do with that. Then my sadness turned to despair! I got hit once again with the salt club, and even harder than the fries or the Greek rub! This freaking made my Diet Pepsi taste like Jolt Cola!
I did manage to take a few more bites of this, and was able to glean some flavoring (hence the 2 points). It tasted like what most places call "hot" buffalo sauce, because it actually had a kick. It's supposed to be the mild sauce, but with beer added to it. You can actually taste the hint of a beer aftertaste, which was kind of cool. So it gets 2 points for flavor, that's it.
SMOKIN' HOT
Please...no more salt! And then, I got punched by a salt mine mine. TKO! About as salty as the Beer Sauce, but again, 2 points for flavor. This is supposed to be their Suicide but with added hickory smoke. It's not spicy, at least not to me. I thought Beer had a better kick. Anyway, the added hickory smoke flavor was welcomed at first, but the more I had it, the less I wanted it. It just gets old after a while.
HACKETT BATH SALTS
You know what's bad? I had fries after some wings, and because everything gradually got saltier, the fries actually tasted normal! Hackett's Wings are like the Dead Sea of salt water. I couldn't believe it man! The salt was unbearable! What's worse, I was really in the mood for hot wings, so even if these were just mediocre, I probably would've enjoyed them so much I'd have gone 4 stars, but no..it was THAT bad. For Hackett's sake, I hope this was just an off day! read more