chicken wing blues

Today Todd and I were out doing a bit of war driving. It’s not that either of us is quite that geeky but I wanted to know the state of Knoxville techno acceptance (state= surf free downtown) for a column. Yep I do actual research for my Metro Pulse column, not as much as I do for a mymac review, but research none the less.

After the requisite research was complete it was time to get some grub. I asked Todd where we should head, Todd suggested “Quaker Steak and Lube”. I laughed, “Quaker Steak and Lube” was a place I thought about taking a snap of and mocking in my blog. You can guess why, it’s a restaurant which looks like an oil change place, not the most appetizing combination. Plus the name is an awful pun, at best you expect that scary bastard from the oats cylinder to seat you at worst, well 10w40 could be a dippin sauce. Yet Todd insisted they had these freakin awesome chicken wings that a guy he worked with ate on an hourly basis. I love animals but chikens can’t fly so a few wingless chickens seemed okay.

We showed up and the place was packed to the rafters at two in the afternoon. I was all for bolting to greener less populated pastures but Todd thought we could get a seat at the bar. He was right, we scored an immediate seat and left everyone else leaning on the handrail bumper.

We were ready for some wings and whipped open the menu. Damn, more choices than ways for cancer to spread. See you start out with ranch wings and work your way up to atomic “sign a release waver wings”. I chose middle of the road Buffalo wings and Todd chose one step higher, Arizona Hot Ass wings or something. We ordered and then we began to grow suspicious, the place seemed to have a chainish feeling. Sure enough QSL places are scattered all over. Damn, so now we are going to get a bunch of least common denominator hot wings. Still, we reasoned, at least we’d get a bunch of them, after all each order was 7 bucks. We didn’t get a bunch of Wings, we didn’t get a moderate amount of wings, we got ten freakin wings. Wings are supposed to be cheap, a loss leader so you’ll buy other stuff, but not at QSL. In fact the bleu cheese sauce is a buck extra.

The wings were fine, extremely mild but fine. The chicken did all the work. Todd is a notorious cheapskate and I have come to appreciate the ways of frugality so take this advice for what it’s worth:
buy 50 dollars worth of QSL chicken wings at grocery store prices (it’ll set you back two bucks) bake the wings til done (325, preheat oven) pour ketchup on wings in last ten minutes, call it quaker steak suicide wings, invest savings in an interest bearing account, retire rich