The Bistro On Bridge: Wings Hotter Than The Burning Of The Bird

by The Phoenixvillain

The fall is about two things in my book. One is football and the other is eating. They go together like the Patriots and cheating. You know: they’re better when together.

While I have some strong opinions on pizza, beer and the Patriots there is no subject I consider myself more of a savant on than that most noble of football fare, the hot wing. The hot wing is a more complex foodstuff than people give it credit for. There are too many variables that go into making a good wing. You need the right size wing (medium) and it has to be cooked to be crisp outside and tender inside. Then there’s the sauce. Ah, the sauce.

You can cook wings to perfection and ruin them with a mediocre or clichéd hot sauce. Butter and Crystal bores me. I have that everyday on my eggs. Worse yet are those supposedly “Insane” hot sauces that come up short on the heat factor. Many are the places that claim to make “Nuclear” or “Inferno” wings. Few are the establishments that purvey a truly fiery hot wing.

Lucky for wing lovers there is a place in Phoenixville with both the consistency and daring to make sublime hot wings. The Bistro on Bridge is succeeding in a location that has proven hard for former restaurants. With a successful club upstairs and great food and big TVs downstairs they will hopefully have continued success. While all that’s nice I go there for one thing: the wings.

Kevin, the cook usually working on football Sundays, takes his wings personally. I learned this the hard way and it is a lesson I am truly grateful for. The waiter smiled smugly when I ordered six of their “hottest” wings. The wings came out smothered in a deadly looking black sauce that wafted an eye-watering gas composed of cayenne and habenero peppers. I asked him what they were, because I had not seen wings this dark at the Bistro before. He asked if they were going to be too hot for me. “No,” I said with cocky certainty, “I’ll be fine.”

I cried a little. I won’t lie. Practically the whole bar watched in mute horror as I cleaned my plate of those devilishly hot wings. It seems that I was the guinea pig for something Kevin was trying out. After carefully washing my face and hands I went in the back to congratulate him on a job well done. Turns out he was more than a little upset that I was able to finish these wings. He took it as a challenge and went back to the drawing board.

I consider myself a bit of a hot head. I grow my own peppers and bottle up my own hot sauces. I can eat habenero or scotch bonnet peppers raw, whole. There is something very satisfying about eating something that nature intended to make unpalatable. The heat in hot peppers has evolved over millions of years in order to deter mammals and their grinding teeth from eating them. Birds possess no saliva and no crushing teeth and so they make a better transporter for the plant’s seeds. Don’t ask about the how.

I can picture Kevin back in the kitchen thinking about what he would have to do in order to create an even hotter wing. The following Sunday I arrived to watch Cliff Lee blow through the Dodgers and to my surprise found a new entry on the impressively long list of the Bistro’s wings. “1,000 Ghosts.” Somewhat giddily I asked if it was in fact what I thought it was. Yes, it was as I suspected. Hot wings cooked with a ghost pepper sauce.

The Naga Jolokia, or ghost pepper (picture right), is the hottest pepper in the world. It is used rarely in cooking as its heat can actually be harmful. On the Scoville scale (used to measure “hotness” in food) the ghost pepper scores a whopping 1,048,000 units. The habenero on average scores 150,000 units. That’s roughly seven habeneros worth of heat in one single pepper.

Cooked with a honey barbecue base, the wings were above all delicious. And painful. No word fits better. It took me ten minutes to eat six wings and I barely got through them. It takes a lot of daring to order these wings and even more daring to make them. You can drive for miles in any direction and not find a selection of wings as daring as the ones at the Bistro On Bridge.

I don’t want to scare people, though Halloween is right around the corner. Bistro has a list of milder selections that range from merely “hot” to sweet selections like barbecue and honey barbecue wings. If you want to go hot you don’t have to necessarily go to the rarefied extreme of the ghost pepper sauce. There is a delicious mango habenero wing that is very much worth trying. My favorite of the non-spicy selections is the garlic and parmesan dry rub wings.

Phoenixville is known for its restaurants and the Bistro On Bridge needs to be recognized as one of the most original. I am willing to say here that the Bistro On Bridge makes the best hot wings in the Philadelphia area. Go down and try for yourself. Though consider yourself warned.