Most downtown restaurants have fun weekday deals or activities. Community members often dine out for taco Tuesdays, tequila Tuesdays, trivia nights, wing Wednesdays or music nights downtown.
Charleston Sports Pub embodies the small-town social bar scene. The bar features high tops in the center with booths along the perimeter and a bar in the back. A couple of TVs decorate the walls, and the lighting is perfect — not too bright, not too dark.
I brought a few friends to enjoy the 20 wings for $17.99 deal. We got four different flavors of bone-in chicken wings: medium, teriyaki, roasted garlic and bourbon molasses.
Medium is a classic. It’s not too hot, but not too plain a sauce for a wing. My only complaint is that there wasn’t enough sauce on the wings. The sauce that was there had great flavor with a tiny kick; there just wasn’t enough of it on the meat.
The teriyaki was amazing. The wings’ crispy skin paired well with the salty and sweet umami flavor. This sauce had the best aroma of the four, and a great consistency, too. The teriyaki stuck well to the chicken without dripping everywhere.
The roasted garlic dry rub wings were where things went a little south. With garlic dry rubs, you’re usually expecting relatively little flavor, depending on where you eat, but this one had just the slightest hints of flavor. It felt like a plain wing order.
Bourbon molasses was hands down the best of the sauces. It’s a clingy sauce that really stuck to the wing. If you are looking for sweet heat loaded with flavor and tang, this is truly the best sauce to try. The best part is the afterheat that you get. The sauce offers a strong flavor on the tongue followed by the most amazing burst of tolerable heat.
All of the wings had great color, but the dry-to-moist wing ratio was a bit off. I felt that choosing a wing was a bit of a lottery, some were dry, others were juicy. They were great vessels for the sauce, if you reside on that side of the sauce or wing debate. Buttermilk ranch was great, though a bit of an awkward setup with small ramekins that could barely fit a wing, so you have to drizzle it on each wing. But it’s a small price to pay if you are into ranch. Each wing felt very portionable, six wings were enough for a filling meal.
My picky eater friend highly recommends the teriyaki and the bourbon molasses, saying each was “pretty good!” My other friend, who split the deal with us, said that their favorites were the bourbon molasses and medium. Mine, personally, was the bourbon molasses. I highly recommend going to CSP just for the bourbon molasses wings, as I was genuinely astonished by how phenomenal that flavor was.
Splitting the wings between friends is a great deal because, between the three of us, we got seven or so wings for $6 each.
