Chicken wings at Smith's Country Inn a meaty treat

Feb. 14, 2006

Smith's Country Inn deserves to be famous far and wide for its jumbo chicken wings.

Terrific deep-fried wings - Buffalo or not - are becoming hard to find. Some places now bake their wings and thus never get the skin quite right. Others bread and deep-fry the wings, then turn the lovely crust to sludge by drenching it with sauce.

We note with dismay the chain restaurants where wing sauces seem far more important than meat quality or cooking. In our experience, the wings at such places are dinky and under- or overcooked. That means they're fatty and rubbery-skinned or chewy and dry.

And expensive. We've paid as much as $6.50 for six wings cut in 12 little pieces.

The wings at Smith's are from another world.

Jumbo here means jumbo. These wings are three to five times more massive than all others we have sampled. They're lightly battered to order and deep-fried whole - with drum, flat and tip still linked - creating craggy, tapering zigzags of skin and meat and bone.

Wing lovers will tingle to tear them apart.

An appetizer platter with seven to eight of these monsters is $5.99 on Wednesdays, $7.95 otherwise.

If you don't specify how to cook them, the wings come sheathed in a thin, crisp, golden crust, with savory meat that is rich and wet and bones that start too hot to touch.

Don't count on much conversation at your table; this is eating you lose yourself in. And it's messy: You'll need one dinner napkin per wing, minimum.

If you ask for your wings cooked extra crispy - something we did recently that's not on the menu - they're even better. The meat stays juicy, the skin gets leaner, and the crust becomes beautifully crunchy-crisp, with an appealing hint of nearly burnt caramel.

To drink? A hoppy beer or can of tart lemonade, ice cold.

Main Course, the Leader-Telegram's restaurant review column, runs the fourth Sunday of the month. Diners' Notebook, a sampling of favorite restaurant offerings, runs the second Tuesday of the month.