The Corner Bar is more than a cheap beer outlet for U of M undergrads. It also has wings. And, what is “Joey Style”?
QUICK LINKS
THE STORY
Great food comes easy in Cedar-Riverside, but with the U of M nearby, so do the young and thirsty customers. Leave the craft beers to Town Hall, and the carefully crafted food to Republic: The Corner Bar is here for you – whether you’re just leaving class, or you want to see what college kids are up to nowadays. (Hint: They still don’t mind sticky tables if the beer is cheap, and it is.)
Bars like this are everywhere, and some of them have pretty great wings, but we were especially excited when we saw The Corner Bar menu, adorned with a gigantic photo of wings and bragging about their “Joey Style” wings. Who’s Joey? We’ll get to that in a bit.*
First thing’s first: All of The Corner Bar’s wings are baked before being fried and sauced. (Bold move, Cotton.) Then, Joey Style wings are taken a step further and “flash grilled,” after the sauce is applied. That’s right, three cooking methods, one wing. But can The Corner Bar make a good thing (wings) even better?
The “traditional wings,” were, in fact, popular with our group. The skin was crispy and the meat was tender – a tenderness Alex credited to the pre-bake. The sauce was also universally enjoyed, and tasters speculated that it may have contained some percentage of tomato. If so, it’s an outlier, but a successful one that stays true to the buffalo spirit while setting itself apart.
And what about “Joey Style”? While we generally enjoyed the wings, the benefits of the time on the grill were unclear. While the char tasted good, the grill seemed to evaporate much of that delicious sauce. Further, we couldn’t detect much improvement to texture between the grilled and traditional wings. As Blake wrote, “Choose a cooking method and stick with it. And that cooking method should be fried.”
*We still don’t know who Joey is. Do you?
THE VERDICT
81/100 |
| Texture: 7/10 |
| Flavor: 8.5/10 |
| Meat Quality: 8/10 |
| Value: 7.5/10 |
| Experience: 9.5/10 |
| Total: 40.5/50 possible points |
SCORE BREAKDOWN
Alex |
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| Notes: Joey wings? No thanks. The grill at the end took away the thing I like about buffalo wings, the sauce. It seemingly evaporated when it was grilled. | |
Andrew |
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| Notes: The $3 PBR didn’t hurt my appreciation of The Corner Bar, even if I thought their wings could be better. | |
Blake |
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| Notes: Why they cooked the Joey Wings three separate times is mind-boggling. Just fry those wings hard and sauce ‘em good, nothing else to it. | |
THE DETAILS
Price: $9.95 for 1 lbs.
Website: http://thecorner.bar
Address: 1501 S Washington Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55454
PHOTO GALLERY
Introducing Wings Afield: Ray’s Original Buffalo Wings – Omaha, Nebraska – Twin Cities Buffalo Club
[…] buffed,” – that is, wings that are grilled after being fried and sauced. See our entry on The Corner Bar for our reaction to this style. As you might guess, it’s a deviation in our eyes, and not a […]