Buffalo Wild Wings Finds 2 New Ways To Feed Us Chicken

Buffalo Wild Wings has a lot of items on its menu aside from the titular chicken wings, but pizza has never really been one of them. Until now. The chain of sports bars recently updated its appetizers menu with new Boneless Bar Pizzas, which feature the chains boneless wings on top with a variety of sauces. I hopped on over to the B-Dubs with a company-issued gift card, interested to try not only the pizzas but the rest of the new snacks added to the menu. Can a chain of wing joints make a pizza that's actually memorable?

One of the Boneless Bar Pizzas is a fairly straightforward Buffalo wing variety. It features mozzarella, chunks of boneless chicken wings, blue cheese crumbles, Buffalo sauce, ranch dressing, and green onions (which we didn't appear to receive on ours, but that's okay), all on a thin crust.

I know there's a very amorphous distinction between flatbreads and pizzas, but I'm more inclined to think of the Bar Pizzas at Buffalo Wild Wings as flatbreads, not pies. The crust is thin, sturdy enough to stand up to plenty of toppings (which appear to be added post-bake), but not uniformly crisp. It's a little soft in the middle and gets much more crisp toward the edges of the pie.

Based off my previous experience as a pizzamaker, my best guess is that the dough is premade and pre-shaped, given how perfectly rectangular and consistent in texture it remains throughout. I mean... it's Buffalo Wild Wings. I get it. Don't worry, I'm not here to overthink things. I'm sure the crust shows up at each location ready to pop in the oven, and that's fine with me.

Besides, the Boneless Bar Pizzas are more about the toppings than the technical dough crap we pizza nerds like to argue over. (By the way, calling it a "bar pizza" is kind of a misnomer, but again, pedantic semantics. Okay, I'm done now.)

In practice, the Buffalo wing Boneless Bar Pizza was okay, save for one issue, and it's one I bring up often when it comes to fast food: There was entirely too much salt. The fried chicken bits, the dressing, the pickled peppers, and the Buffalo sauce are all packed with salt, and after a few bites of the pizza, I just couldn't take it any longer. I had to bail on the slice. Otherwise, the flavors are about as prototypical American bar food as you'd expect.

Buffalo Boneless Bar Pizza: B-

Dennis Lee

The Honey BBQ Boneless Bar Pizza has a lot of stuff on it: cheddar-jack, mozzarella, boneless honey BBQ wing chunks, bacon bits, pickled peppers, green onions (which we didn't get on this pizza either), Buffalo sauce, and additional honey BBQ sauce. Phew!

I'm happy to report that this one is much better than the Buffalo one. The syrupy sweet barbecue sauce helped temper all the salt from the other ingredients (though it's no less salty, unfortunately). The Buffalo sauce and the pickled peppers balanced out the ultra-sugary barbecue sauce with a vinegar kick, and the flavors were pretty damn lively.

Honey Barbecue Boneless Bar Pizza: B+

I also got a chance to try another new addition to the BWW menu, an appetizer called Bird Dawgs. Frankly, these sounded kinda silly on paper: They're just chicken tenders nestled into a hot dog bun with various toppings on them.

But forget about what it says on paper. These apps were much, much, better than I'd anticipated. I don't know if it was an execution thing—the tenders were fried perfectly—or a matter of well-selected flavors to pair with the chicken, but the Bird Dawgs were just plain satisfying.

Our favorite was the Honey Barbecue Bird Dawg, which included cole slaw, barbecue sauce, and ranch; everything worked well together, a parade of sweet, salty, tart, and crunchy.

In second place was the Loaded Bird Dawg, which had beer cheese, grilled onions, and honey mustard on top (again, it was supposed to have green onions, but they were missing—supply chain issues, maybe). It was a close call; the Loaded Bird Dawg wasn't quite as balanced as the Honey Barbecue on account of the rich beer cheese.

The Buffalo-style Bird Dawg, with Buffalo sauce, ranch, slaw, and (missing) green onions, was our least favorite, probably just because it wasn't as creative as the others. But it was perfectly fine. I'm about as surprised as you that we liked chicken tenders stuffed into hot dog buns, but hey, gotta give credit where credit's due. Well done, B-Dubs. You've built something here. 

Bird Dawgs (all varieties): A-