What's good here?

Overall Restaurant – Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 – Success! Finally found a bomb hot wings joint in Eugene. Check out their Facebook: Hot Mama’s Wings’ Facebook.

Hot Mama’s Wings (420 West 13th Avenue, 97401) just opened yesterday and you can already find a ton of information about the hot, new restaurant on the Internet. Big ups to them for using social media as a marketing tool! Instead of going into details about the whole restaurant, I’ll just recommend to you what to order from there. If you’re interested in learning more about the restaurant, you can check out Oregon Daily Emerald’s article or Eugene Weekly’s article on the joint. I’ll just eat there and tell you what’s good.

So first off, I got to tell you: Their wings are meaty. This is a good thing. I had wings at the other hot wings joint near campus last weekend and those were literally just bones. Those tasted like frozen wings you buy at the grocery store and reheat them in the microwave.

The wings at Hot Mama’s however, are real, meaty chicken wings.

Here’s what my friends and I tried today:

Starters:

Crispy, brown French fries

French fries – Rating: 5/5 – They were brown, but crispy. The color of the French fries threw me off at first, but dang, they were good. They crunch in your mouth.

Jalapeno Poppers - Jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in bacon

Jalapeno poppers – Rating: 3/5 – Hollowed out peppers, stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped with bacon. The pepper-filled cream cheese was a bit rich for my taste. I ended up just eating the bacon wrap.

Tater tots – Rating: 4/5 – Crispy tater tots, good, but could have used more seasoning.

Main course:

Wings – Rating: 5/5 – Meaty & crispy. The best part: Not messy. It’s like they cooked the sauce into the wings. It’s not your usual deep-fried wings smothered in sauce. You get the flavors when you bite into the wings without having your face and hands covered in sauce. They offered tempeh, grilled and fried wings. We all went with the fried.

Upper left: Chipotle Bourbon, Upper right: Jalapeno Poppers, Middle: Hot

Flavors of wings we tried (I don’t have the exact flavor names. I made the mistake of not taking a picture of the menu):

Hot – Rating: 3/5 – Not too flavorful, but spicy. Have some fun, order something that’s spicy and flavorful.

Medium – Rating: 4/5 – Not too flavorful, but a good amount of spicy for those who cannot handle hot.

BBQ – Rating: 4/5 – Plain, standard BBQ flavor, as expect. Maybe they should offer Honey BBQ also so it’s not as standard.

Cilantro Lime – Rating: 3/5 – The flavor of the cilantro did not come out, neither did the lime. It just tasted like a piece of fried chicken.

Root-beer Glazed – Rating: 5/5 – The table’s first favorite. A tad bit sweet, a tad bit spicy and a tad bit salty, perfecto. You can taste that spicy, sweet root beer flavor. Awesome! *Must try!

Pineapple – Ratings: 3/5 – More like limey than pineapple-y? A little bit too tangy of a flavor for wings.

Chipotle Bourbon – Rating 5/5 – My table’s second favorite. Extremely spicy and flavorful at the same time. *Must try!

All of us ordered 9 wings for $8.50 and chose three different flavors. Appetizers were about $4 and drinks were $2. They had many other choices of food besides wings, but we went for the wings. I’ll post a copy of the menu for prices and choices as soon as I get my hands on one. Post comments if you tried anything else from the restaurant that I should review! I’ll definitely be back there soon.

Check out urbanspoon’s rating of Hot Mama’s Wings:

Happy eating!