In 2010 we were invited to be a part of the the Ulster County Wing Fling at Cantine Field in Saugerties and guess what? We came away with first place in the voter awards. Here's a recap of how we made our wings so good and how we've kept them as a menu favorite all these years.
As the owners of a food business that's committed to sustainability, the idea of specializing in chicken wings, can bring one's ideals into conflict. This is the type of gray area we all come up against at various points in our life where the choice is to "give people what they want" or take the high road. We caved on this one.
In 2010 we had the honor of participating in a fun local event that brings out huge crowds of wing enthusiasts: The Ulster County Wing Fling! So how do you even begin to plan for something like this when you've never done it before? We had heard wild stories from the year before that the vendors were crazy running out of wings early on in the day, so we racked our brains and came up with the i of 5,000 wings, hoping this would take us through to the end. And it almost did - we ran out of wings around 4:30 - much better than some of our counterparts that were looking to buy some of our product mid-day.
One of our favorite chefs, Jonathan Sheridan was known in many of his former "chef-ing" jobs (Vong / NYC and Rosendale Cement Company to name a few) as an amazing creator of wing recipes, so we let him have free reign to come up with the winning recipe: Sweet Thai Chile Wings and Spicy Jalapeno Wings. We thought they were amazing and so did the 10,000+ folks visiting the festival. We won the award at the end of the day - The People's Choice Award for the Best Chicken Wings in Ulster County. Needless to say we were VERY proud and the Sweet Thai Chile Wings have been a staple at Bistro-to-Go ever since. We make them almost every day.
Here are a few snapshots from our prepping to leave and from the competition.
And of course the huge award that graced our shelves for many years. What an honor!
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