Wing Hut
826 East Cork StreetJ and B are on a road trip without me.
B qualified for the US Figure Skating Excel National Festival at The Skating Club of Boston this week.
J has the entire month of July off so she doesn’t have to use PTO to travel. We’re also going to Lake Placid in about ten days so I had to decided which trip I was going on. We couldn’t afford for me to do both. J and B flew to Boston but we will drive to Lake Placid. All four of us are going though so that’s going to be a pricey trip. I have very little PTO left as it is so I would have had to try to fly the day of his competition and come back home with them on Saturday.
I wasn’t totally home alone this time. As much as she wanted to, L didn’t get to go either for some of the same reasons I didn’t get to go. Plane tickets are expensive.
Tuesday night she gets done with skating before I get off work. She was able to catch a ride home with a friend so I wasn’t in a super big hurry when I left work. There’s a familiar chicken place that just moved in to a new location somewhat on my way home so I decided to stop there for dinner.
The Wing Hut has been in Kalamazoo for a few years. They first opened up in Campus Pointe next to Western Michigan University back in 2022. There was a second location added the following year in the food court at the Crossroads Mall. Those locations closed and the business moved in to a new location on Cork Street near St. Mary’s Street in the Milwood Neighborhood. The restaurant shares space with House of Soul (I’ll do a separate blog post on that place eventually) in the building that was most recently Quekas. It’s an oddly shaped building on a very narrow parcel of land. There is parking on the west side of the building. The east side of the building buts right up to the Corkscrew Party Store parking lot.
The building has undergone some renovations since it was Quekas but the layout remains pretty much the same. When you walk in, there is a sign pointing you to either The Wing Hut or House of Soul.
The Wing Hut is on the left side of the building. It has what looks like a more traditional order counter. House of Soul is to the right. They have more of a window to order from. Each place had their own staff working so it’s more of a space sharing thing than a combination of the two restaurants. It seemed like there was only one person working at each of the restaurants though. The person at the counter would take an order then disappear in to the kitchen until the food was ready. There wasn’t a line the day I was in there but I had to wait a little while when I got there and there were people that came in after me that just sat down until my order came out and they could order.
I headed up to The Wing Hut order counter because I was already set on ordering wings. There are no menus on the wall but there are several laminated menus on the order counter. I put in an order for Ten Whole Wings and an order of fries. The cost came out to about $22.
The dining room definitely went through some major renovations. Carpet was replaced with laminate flooring which gives the space a much brighter feeling. The heavy wood tables at the sit down Mexican restaurant were replaced with booths along the east wall.
The other side of the room has a mixture of table types but they’re all black which is sharp contrast around the light color on the flooring. There are some four tops with metal chairs along side some bar type tables. I just chose to sit on one of the barstools to wait. It took about twenty minutes for my order to cook which is expected at a chicken restaurant.
When it was ready, I grabbed the box and headed home. L was home already so I asked her if I should pick her up dinner somewhere. She said no so I headed towards home to eat.
I popped the box of fries open first. They were pretty simple fries that seem to be the same at all wing restaurants like this. They’re frozen food service fries and they had a bit of a lemon pepper dusting on them. They were the kind of fries that are “fine.” Nothing wrong with them and I always enjoy them…especially with a bit of that seasoning, but they’re nothing worth going out of the way for.
The chicken at The Wing Hut is whole chicken wings, not Buffalo style wings. If you were to break it up in to Buffalo wings, it would be twenty wings. They’re fried up really crispy and served naked.
The wings also had a dusting of the lemon pepper seasoning but it wasn’t an obnoxious amount. The wings were all super crispy and really tender and juicy. I’ve always liked the wings from The Wing Hut and that’s still true at this new location.
Whole wings are are a whole culture in some areas…Chicago for example and to a lesser extent in Grand Rapids. Kalamazoo hasn’t really had a consistent wing place like this until The Wing Hut opened up. There was a gap for a while during the rebuilding of this place but I was really excited to see they were open again.
SW Michigan Dining 