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Buffalo Wild Wings Opens in Dubuque!

We were lucky enough to have been invited by the good people at Buffalo Wild Wings to take part in an advance sampling of their great food and atmosphere over the weekend. The experience lived up to the hype that our 365ink editor Tim Brechlin had been sharing about the restaurant. It's like heaven for guys. But the girls loved it too. Sports on TV's everywhere, and I mean everywhere, and a table loaded with buffalo wings of every flavor, each one better than the last, but that only because it was the one that was still meaty. We were torn as to our favorites. No worries though, just get a lot of every flavor and you're set. Our super nice server offered us an interactive trivia device while we waited for our food and we finished up the visit with a huge slice of some kind of chocolatey cake love. The restaurant officially opens Monday, July 23rd with the first 100 patrons receiving free wings for a year. I think our friend Tom Squad from Envision Sports Designs is camping out. That's dedication! Hopefully he's got his copy of Harry Potter to keep him company.

Buffalo Wild Wings:
You Have to Be Here!
America's fastest-growing fast-food chain comes to Dubuque
by Tim Brechlin

Gentlemen ... start your engines.

Your wing-consumption engines, that is. After months and months of people asking when it was going to open, Buffalo Wild Wings has opened its doors. And now Dubuque is home to not only one of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in the country, but also a tremendous sports bar location and a new entertainment destination on the West End.

" I'll tell you right now, I'm ready for this place to be open," says general manager Carlos Goodman. "It gets hard after a while to keep on telling people who come in our front door that we're not open yet. But we're here now, and we are open."

To say that Buffalo Wild Wings is here is something of an understatement. The West End restaurant, located near Red Robin and Star Cinema, offers a ridiculous array of not just dining but entertainment options. Let's start, for example, with the televisions ... all 46 of them. Oh, and 8 big-screens, too. All of them running in HD.

" We cover all the bases," says Goodman, who came to Dubuque after a stint of operating the Davenport Buffalo Wild Wings location. "We're trying to become this area's ultimate sports venue."

Furthering the entertainment offerings is the inclusion of the NTN Buzztime interactive game. You know what I'm talking about: You play trivia games, or card games, or other sorts of games, with a Playmaker device at your table, and you're competing against other tables. You might scoff now, if you have not yet been exposed, but once you are, you'll be hooked.

Buffalo Wild Wings, popularly known as "B-Dubs," began way back in 1982, when a couple of Buffalo, New York, natives moved to Kent, Ohio. Unfortunately, when they got to Kent, they discovered a terrifying reality: There was no one in the area who served Buffalo-style chicken wings. They had two options: Fling themselves off the nearest cliff because life wasn't worth living anymore ... or open up a restaurant. Thankfully for those of us who enjoy the American art form known as wings that are hotter than hell, they dropped Option A in favor of Option B, and opened up the first Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck in Columbus, Ohio. Because I know you're going to be wondering what on earth a weck is, it's short for kummelweck, a salty roll that's exceedingly popular in New York.

Speaking of food ... oh, the food! As you can see from the array of photographs along these pages (some might call it "food porn"), Buffalo Wild Wings delivers on all counts. From half-pound burgers and jerk chicken sandwiches to wraps and salads, there's a wide variety of food selections on the menu ... and then, of course, there are the wings.

Let's talk wings for a moment. Buffalo Wild Wings specializes in those, as you might suspect, and the restaurant specializes in style. How do 14 different sauces sound? Granted, it's a departure from the "traditional" definition of a Buffalo wing sauce, given that the original wings were merely deep-fried and then coated in a sauce comprising cayenne pepper sauce, white vinegar, butter, salt and garlic. But whoever said that we need to keep with tradition? Look at Lot One, where Joey Zwack's teriyaki chicken wings are a little slice of heaven. Creativity is never, ever a bad thing.

Here's how the Buffalo Wild Wings system works: Fourteen sauces, all with varying levels of intensity. It starts down at the bottom with #1, "Smilin'," and then it moves up through Mild, Parmesan Garlic, Medium, Spicy Garlic, Caribbean Jerk and more, until you reach the Holy Grail of hot sauces ... Blazin'. This writer is a veteran of many a spicy chicken wing; it's likely that my death will include hot sauce in some fashion or another. But the very first time I tangled with the Blazin' sauce, I was unprepared for the beast. I had no idea that I was going to wrestle the wing sauce equivalent of a 7-foot-tall, 500-pound monster in a steel cage in a no-disqualifications match. To say I was sweating bullets is an understatement ... it was more like sweating a waterfall. No amount of water or any other beverage could douse the four-alarm fire currently scorching my mouth. To make matters worse, the BWW bartender, watching me struggle in my war against this foe, retreated to the kitchen and returned with a small plastic tub of the Blazin' sauce. He then took a large spoonful of it and gulped it, with no adverse side effects (at the time, at least; I'm sure he paid for it the next time he hit the restroom). In other words, this sauce is blazin', and it's spectacular.

So why, you ask, would anyone subject themselves to such a sauce? Well, for one, it's actually quite tasty once you build up a tolerance to the heat. After that, well ... it's all about the Blazin' Challenge. What manner of masochism is that, you ask? It is a test of strength the likes of which have not been seen since the days of the Roman gladiatorial contests. Twelve Blazin' wings in six minutes or less ... and you can't touch your face or drink any water. Cowboy up. Can you Find out for yourself at the Dubuque Buffalo Wild Wings on Friday, July 27. Oh, and the diner with the best time in the Blazin' Challenge on that day will win free wings for a year. Now you know you have to compete.

There will be several other opportunities for men to, well, be men in the coming weeks at Buffalo Wild Wings. Tuesday, July 31, will feature the Bud Light Best Seat in the House giveaway, where wing connoisseurs can register to win the VIP Best Seat for any NFL game of their choice. What's the Best Seat, you ask? Think gigantic recliner with a cooler of Bud Light right next to you, in front of one of Buffalo Wild Wings' massive big-screen TVs. If that doesn't have you ready for some football, there's no hope for you. (Go Bears.) For information on these and many other exciting events coming up at Buffalo Wild Wings, check out the sidebar with all the details.

With 20 tap beers, including offerings from Goose Island, a full menu with some delectable desserts guaranteed to put some of the 365ink staff into diabetic comas, umpteen billion televisions and, you know, wings, Buffalo Wild Wings has become not only a premier West End destination, but yet another sign of the fantastic economic growth that our city is experiencing. You don't need to line up and wait any longer. It's here. So check it out — as the sign says, you have to be here.