Wing Wars: Buffalo Wild Wings vs Quaker Steak and Lube

What God-fearing American guy doesn't love smashing a plate of wings?  With wings, you get to eat meat, you get to eat that meat off the bone, and you get sauce all over you hands and face with no regard for etiquette.  Eating wings is a celebration of masculinity.  Here in my area, there are two major competing chains of wing places... Buffalo Wild Wings and Quaker Steak and Lube.  While there are well over 600 B-Dubs throughout the country and only 35 Quaker Steaks, there are an equal number here in Lorain County (2).

With both places, if you're looking for a steak or ribs, or even a burger, I'd go elsewhere.  These are wing places first and foremost, and the rest of the food is pretty average.  So when examining the merits of these two, we will mostly focus on the wings.

In my experience, I've found the wings at Quaker Steak to be larger than those at BW3.  I work for a pizza company that serves wings and the size our wings are very inconsistent week to week, but I've been to both of these places enough to say that Quaker's are consistently larger.  This, however, is of little importance.  It's the sauce that makes the wing.

Both places have a long lineup of sauces.  Honestly, though, I've been disappointed with each sauce that I've tried at BW3.  The last time I was there, it was actually difficult selecting one I really wanted.  The sauce list at Quaker is more varied and better than BW3's all across the board.  A few Quaker sauces are of particular note to me:  Louisiana Lickers (Hot, Cajun, Garlic, BBQ mix), Arizona Ranch (spicy ranch flavor), and the Thai 'R' Cracker (Sweet Thai flavor with chili and garlic).  I don't think BW3 has anything that can compare to these.  I'm not much for the extremely hot sauces, but both places offer some hot stuff.  I did try a small taste of BW3's hottest sauce, Blazin' (70x hotter than a jalapeno).  It actually tasted pretty good for about a second before the burning began.  Quaker now has the Triple Atomic sauce (500,000 Scoville Heat Units, or 100x hotter than a jalapeno).  Try it if you want, dummy.  Of course if you really want to, you can find significantly hotter sauces than this in some sadistic corners of our society.

Quaker is a cool place to eat if you like cars and bikes.  The automotive theme is everywhere, and they do have car shows and meets.   BW3 has more large TV's and loud drunk kids.  I really don't care much about cars or drunks (cars AND drunks is different story).  But I do care about wings, and to me, Quaker Steak and Lube provides a much better wing than its competition at BW3.