Buffalo wings in Taiwan (Taoyuan)

Looking for places that sell Buffalo wings in Taiwan.
with the most obvious place being TGI Friday’s, are there any other restaurants that serve Buffalo wings near Taoyuan?
(Did some googling myself, but almost all are breaded wings)

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Not Taoyuan, and I’m not sure if they’d count as breaded or if they’re even wings (they call them drumsticks), but I enjoyed the ones at Redpoint a few weeks ago - their Tuesday-night special.

Caveat: I never eat wings in Taiwan, and normally only eat them on what were pre-COVID annual trips to North America, so I hadn’t had wings in two and a half years and my standards aren’t at their usual level. For an “Oh god I miss chicken wings” dish, these were good.

But for what it’s worth I’d say a “typical” Korean fried chicken restaurant in Taiwan is actually better than a “typical” Buffalo wings serving in a North American restaurant. I’m not sure what the situation is in Taoyuan, but in Danshui those fried chicken places were somewhat hard to find a few years ago, and are now everywhere.

Menu and restaurant link below.

https://www.redpointbrewing.com/menus

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It’s super hard to find legitimate Buffalo wings in Taiwan, and it’s amazing the number of ways they manage to mess them up. They’re often breaded, or the sauce is an afterthought, or it’s sweet, or not spicy, or any combination of the above. The only place I can think of off the top of my head that does them right is Cowboy’s at Nanwan, Kenting. I can’t even find good ones in Taipei, which I assume means you won’t in Taoyuan, either, but if you do I’d like to know.

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Not exactly buffalo wings, but Hotties just opened a branch in Taoyuan which is a (surprisingly good) clone of Dave’s hot chicken.

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The sell buffalo sauce in lots of supermarkets. Just air fry done wings and toss them. Easy to make the sauce yourself too.

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I haven’t ordered them but was under the impression from seeing them on other people’s tables that those were more of a sweet BBQ sauce style than a spicy Buffalo sauce (red pepper sauce and butter) style. I would love to be wrong, because you can’t beat the price of the Tuesday special. I’ll go back and order them if those were actual Buffalo wings, or Buffalo any-other-part-of-the-chicken. (Usually drumsticks means legs, but that would be odd, especially at that price.)

You’d have to raise some flying buffalo…

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True. I’ve made them at home several times. It’s not the same as being able to kick back and order them with a good draft beer at a bar, though!

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Now that I think about it, I suppose the generic American chain places (Chili’s, Friday’s, Hooters) are going to have decent-ish wings by Taiwan standards. I can’t stand those kind of places and never go to them, though, so I can’t be sure. I’m standing by Cowboy’s as the best on the island.

I certainly thought they were more in the red pepper style. NOT very spicy to my palate - no shame, because not much is - but more buffalo than barbecue flavor to me.

The part of the chicken confuses me to an extent that perhaps I’d best not think about it. Like just the “one-bone” wing pieces (rather than the two-bone pieces), but more meat than is, er, normal.

Six of them plus a pint for $230 on Tuesdays - definitely worth a try. I believe they’re the only North American wings I’ve had in Taiwan that I’d bother to order again, but I’ll repeat the caveat that I hadn’t had wings for over two and a half years - and perhaps haven’t bothered with wings in Taiwan in a decade. (As I suggested above, I think that itch is far better scratched with Korean fried chicken here.)

You can see photos over at their Google Maps link.

EDIT: Also this thread, last updated in 2016, so I’m not sure how many of the places described are still around!

And this article introduces a few places I don’t know. I always wonder what pieces like this use for their sources. “Chicken wings in Taipei are one of the tastiest eats in the city”?!

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I saw that too on Google maps, opened less than a week ago!
But they’re breaded 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

That’s part of the wing-- the inner part, closest to the body of the bird. These are often called “drumettes” in the US. It’s confusing that Red Point calls them drumsticks, because that normally refers only to legs, which of course are dark meat and much larger.

The full chicken wing has three bones-- the two-bone outer part traditionally used for Buffalo wings and the one-bone inner part that has increasingly been used more as wings have gained in popularity. When served in other styles (like at KFC or whatever) the entire wing is usually all together with three bones.

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OK, drumettes - thanks. But they’re still unlike chicken wings I ever remember eating in Canada, in that most of the bone is already bare/ stripped, and there’s more meat at the top. To be honest they reminded most of lamb “lollipops” in style of cut!

As I said above, the more I think about it, the more reservations I have. But we’ve bred chickens to become such odd mutant birds that maybe this is what they’ve turned into now.

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Okay, that’s weird. I don’t think it’s mutant chicken breeding, though. It might have to do with how the chicken is cut, so that they’re basically using scraps that the consumer of the rest of the bird didn’t want. That would explain why they are able to basically give them away for free. That’s actually similar to the story of the creation of Buffalo wings in the first place. The outer portion of the wing used to be extremely cheap in the US, so a bartender in Buffalo, NY turned them into spicy bar snacks to get customers to buy more beer.

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When I was little I used to think the drumettes were from newborn chicks…

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Same. Or smaller-than-normal chickens, anyway. I may have even thought that to an older age than I care to admit.

Ha. Yeah, that statement is a stretch. To be fair, most of those do look good, but very few of them look like Buffalo. Some are just straight up fried chicken, like Texas Rangers, which I like-- It’s at least better than KFC.

I didn’t even know there was a Beer Talk in Taipei. I’ve been to the one in Kaohsiung a few times, but haven’t had the wings. Those look like they’d be worth investigating.

I used to be a fan of the burgers at Burger & Co. but never had the wings. It appears they still have a location down south in Taipei, which I didn’t realize. I only knew the one up north which closed years ago.

Eddy’s has sometimes interesting wings, but nothing Buffalo about them, either-- various flavored sauces on breaded wings. Black Dog in Kaohsiung also has some tasty but not strictly buffalo wings. They use a sriracha sauce mixed with a regular red pepper sauce, I think. I’m not sure why so many places have such an aversion to just doing regular Buffalo wings, which would be easier to make. They must not work with the local palate. I send the above recommendation of Cowboy’s in Kenting. They have great prices on straight-up legit buffalo wings during their happy hour.

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I would like to come back and add this, Domino’s had these “hot and sour” wings that rang a bell of what I had in the US (Buffalo Wild Wings), but they were priced absurdly and they stopped buying the hot sauce and selling it altogether a few months ago.

I think Costco’s hot wing is probably cheapest but they taste really off.

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They’re cooked for WAY too long that the meat falls off the bone, and the sauce feels diluted, but they’re better compared to the “local” options out there.