Chicken Wings

Company description: Our meaty chicken wings done in a special blend of our own spices. Lemony! Peppery! Garlicky! A little rosemary and some Romano cheese ... WOW. Chain: Chickie's & Pete's. Location: 1526 Packer Ave. Order time: 10 minutes. Price: $9.95 (small size). Review: Sure, you go to Chickie's & Pete's for the crabs and crab fries (and beer), but every once in a while the locally based chain adds a new item. These new Italian Wings are good. They taste of herbs and lemon, and our batch was cooked perfectly - crunchy on the outside and juicy on the inside.

The Birds might not be flying up and down the field this year, but that's no reason to pass up a party. At the very least, the Super Bowl is an excuse for even those with the most distinguished of palates to get down with some Fritos, dip, and the MVP of the Sunday spread: the chicken wing. However, not all wings are created equal (nor are the good ones thoughtlessly dumped into a fryer). Chefs use a variety of techniques to achieve a tender, meaty interior and crispy skin. And that's before they add even a lick of sauce.

There never seems to be any problem in getting guests to polish off the chicken wings. The problem, if any, is in the initial preparation of the wings: taking the wings and disjointing them so you're left with one piece that's an elongated oval and another that looks like a miniature drumstick. The proper technique is simple and easily mastered. A sharp butcher knife, a cutting board and an attentive eye are all you need. To begin, hold the chicken wing so that it looks something like the letter V with a small extension coming from the top left.

THERE IS A LOT TO ADORE - or at least to ogle - at the Wing Bowl. There are local celebs, namely, 94WIP's Angelo Cataldi and Al Morganti, co-creators of the 21-year-old extravaganza, and Rhea Hughes, who keeps the guys in line. There are an estimated 20,000 spectators - rowdy, predominantly male carousers who pay 10 bucks each to get their Super Bowl party started early (very early) Friday, like way before 6 a.m. There are Wingettes, a scantily clad, buxom battalion that is part cheerleaders, part servers, part centerfolds.

They arose before the dawn, put on their game faces (and a clean T-shirt), and sat down to eat chicken wings shortly after 8 a.m. Mounds of chicken wings. With 7-Up or water to wash them down. Hold the blue cheese. When the last bones were counted at yesterday's Wing Bowl, Mark Vogeding, a burly warehouseman from Paulsboro who goes by the nickname Big Rig, was crowned Philadelphia's top wing-eater by sports-talk station WIP-AM. He won a trip to Aruba. He sucked the meat and skin off 164 chicken wings in a half-hour, leaving the Wing Bowl record of 143 in a pile of napkins.

Tonight, the NBA's brightest spotlight comes to Phoenix, a city that is finally hot in more ways than one. Usually, no one in his right mind comes to southern Arizona in late spring. It is searing and uncomfortable. You walk around town and need only a tin-foil jacket to call yourself a baked potato. But there is a sharp electric buzz in this traditionally torpid desert outpost now and Charles Barkley is the reason. He's the reason that people have forgotten the shame of having a Super Bowl temporarily taken away while the state brought its holiday laws into the 20th century.

A trip to the movies at the Riverview just got tastier, and a lot more exotic, too, with the recent opening of Mekong River, Liem Ma's stylishly glow-lit Vietnamese restaurant on Front Street just a block from the theater. Ma's parents own the traditional Pho & Café Viet Huong on 11th Street, known for its broken rice and pork. And Mekong is authentic, too, despite the modern decor. The crispy noodles are irresistible, the pho is spot-on, and the dry noodles with seafood and special sauce are a crowd favorite.

Buffalo is famous for more than having a team that loses the Super Bowl. In the competition for best bar food, it has no challengers. Buffalo chicken wings - hot, spicy and, yes, a little greasy - are a winning dish. Especially when paired with blue- cheese-stuffed celery. This dish has a number of contrasts that our senses find appealing. First the flavors: spicy chicken and tangy blue cheese. Then the temperature: hot chicken and cold celery. Finally, the texture: chewy chicken and crunchy celery.

There are a few theories floating around in culinary (and I use the term loosely) circles about the discovery of Buffalo Wings, those tangy, messy, hard-to-put-down little buggers that have been popping up on restaurant menus across America in recent years. One way-out theory holds that Buffalo Wings were originally a dish concocted by an anonymous cook who accidentally spilled a bowl of Louisiana hot sauce on a pile of cooked chicken wings destined for the scrap heap. Another off-the-wall idea is that early western pioneers gobbled chicken wings in order to gain strength for the upcoming buffalo hunt.

ASK A GUY who attended SportsRadio 94WIP's Wing Bowl afterward who won or how many wings they ate, and he might have an answer. But probably not. Wing Bowl, you see, isn't necessarily about wings. It's about Wingettes. These scantily clad young ladies who cheer on the contestants are what really draws the crowds, said WIP host and Wing Bowl co-creator Angelo Cataldi. Wing Bowl 21 gets under way at 6 a.m. Friday at the Wells Fargo Center. "People come not to see fat guys eat chicken wings but beautiful women acting wild and dressed provocatively," Cataldi said.

Gio Gonzalez munched on chicken wings at a sports bar in his hometown as he watched Team USA rally to stay alive in the World Baseball Classic on Sunday. The next game he'll take in from the mound. The Washington Nationals' lefthander will start for the U.S. team in its opener of Round Two on Tuesday night against Puerto Rico. The U.S. team rallied with seven runs in the last two innings Sunday to advance by beating Canada, 9-4, in Phoenix. Gonzalez wasn't with the team in Arizona.

The addictive and complex sauce known as mole is gracing lots of menus around the city these days, often informed by the cooks and dishwashers who learned from their mothers and grandmothers back in Mexico. In addition to the long-simmered mole poblano, built on chiles, fruits, and frequently chocolate, there are countless variations, including quick and fresh mole verde, and nontraditional uses, like mole drizzled over a pulled pork breakfast enchilada at Hawthorne's or mole-glazed chicken wings at SoWe.

"Be not among . . . gluttonous eaters of meat. " - Proverbs 23:20     Gluttony: In the Bible, it is condemned as one of the seven deadly sins. In Philadelphia, it is celebrated. I am speaking, of course, about the annual Wing Bowl, a contest in which contestants compete to see who can eat the most chicken wings in a given amount of time. Held today in South Philadelphia, the Wing Bowl attracts tens of thousands of spectators and is now an international event.

THERE IS A LOT TO ADORE - or at least to ogle - at the Wing Bowl. There are local celebs, namely, 94WIP's Angelo Cataldi and Al Morganti, co-creators of the 21-year-old extravaganza, and Rhea Hughes, who keeps the guys in line. There are an estimated 20,000 spectators - rowdy, predominantly male carousers who pay 10 bucks each to get their Super Bowl party started early (very early) Friday, like way before 6 a.m. There are Wingettes, a scantily clad, buxom battalion that is part cheerleaders, part servers, part centerfolds.

ASK A GUY who attended SportsRadio 94WIP's Wing Bowl afterward who won or how many wings they ate, and he might have an answer. But probably not. Wing Bowl, you see, isn't necessarily about wings. It's about Wingettes. These scantily clad young ladies who cheer on the contestants are what really draws the crowds, said WIP host and Wing Bowl co-creator Angelo Cataldi. Wing Bowl 21 gets under way at 6 a.m. Friday at the Wells Fargo Center. "People come not to see fat guys eat chicken wings but beautiful women acting wild and dressed provocatively," Cataldi said.

No one can accuse Michael Solomonov of lacking vision for the future of Federal Donuts, the quirky fried chicken and doughnut concept he and his partners just expanded to a second location in Center City with a debut - with live webcam streaming of the line - that has at times bordered on foodie hysteria. "I just want to get big enough," says the chef, who also co-owns Zahav, "where we can have delivery guys in chicken suits scooting around town on mopeds fueled by recycled fryer oil. How awesome would that be?"

Company description: Our meaty chicken wings done in a special blend of our own spices. Lemony! Peppery! Garlicky! A little rosemary and some Romano cheese ... WOW. Chain: Chickie's & Pete's. Location: 1526 Packer Ave. Order time: 10 minutes. Price: $9.95 (small size). Review: Sure, you go to Chickie's & Pete's for the crabs and crab fries (and beer), but every once in a while the locally based chain adds a new item. These new Italian Wings are good. They taste of herbs and lemon, and our batch was cooked perfectly - crunchy on the outside and juicy on the inside.

A trip to the movies at the Riverview just got tastier, and a lot more exotic, too, with the recent opening of Mekong River, Liem Ma's stylishly glow-lit Vietnamese restaurant on Front Street just a block from the theater. Ma's parents own the traditional Pho & Café Viet Huong on 11th Street, known for its broken rice and pork. And Mekong is authentic, too, despite the modern decor. The crispy noodles are irresistible, the pho is spot-on, and the dry noodles with seafood and special sauce are a crowd favorite.

Following up on his East Passyunk pizza-red-gravy-and-beer hit Birra, Gordon Dinerman has opened a sibling, Barra, in Old City. Dinerman is partners with Rob LaScala at 239 Chestnut St. (215-238-9983), in the space that briefly housed LaScala's Rocchino's and Azione; previously, it was Dolce and Paradigm — famed as the bar whose clear restroom doors fog up only when locked. Barra is positioned as Birra's younger, more dynamic sibling, with a more sophisticated menu plus a serious bar program and a late-night lounge scene Thursdays through Saturdays.

SOME PEOPLE LIKE Pepsi with their chicken wings. Bill "El Wingador" Simmons apparently prefers coke. Simmons, the self-described "just a guy that liked chicken" who became a Philadelphia-area celebrity for repeatedly dominating Sportsradio 94WIP's Wing Bowl, was busted Friday when New Jersey State Police troopers found $8,000 worth of cocaine and $4,000 in cash in his Kia Soul, police said Tuesday. And it wasn't a random traffic stop. Gloucester County detectives and the state police's drug-trafficking unit already had their eyes on Simmons, 50, of Woodbury Heights, for suspected drug-dealing.