With coronavirus forcing us all inside, we’ve become even more dependent on technology, if that’s at all possible. Classes and work have primarily shifted online, deteriorating my already poor focus. Moreover, with nothing to do besides stay inside all day (save my daily run), I’ve gotten used to picking up my phone again and again and again. Without so much as a second thought, I reach down to that 5-inch escape from my daily life, indulging my imagination through games or putting my mind at ease with some Netflix or sating my need for information with the latest COVID-19 facts and figures. It’s become an extension of my hand, a constant companion in the face of today’s uncertainty.

“Your screen time was up 27% this week, for an average of 6 hours, 10 minutes.”

“Your screen time was up 25% this week, for an average of 4 hours, 51 minutes.”

“Your screen time was up 31% this week, for an average of 3 hours, 42 minutes.” 

 I’ve gotten all too comfortable with these kinds of notifications lately (Yes, these are my screen time notifications from the past three weeks.) I’ll be staring at my phone on a leisurely Sunday morning in my bed, because what else can I do in bed besides look at my phone? “Your screen time was up…” and I stop reading. I know, I get it. It’s not my fault. If I could hang out with my friends or actually be in class, I wouldn’t be on my phone this much! Plus, my phone habits will go back to normal whenever this is all over.

 But here’s the thing: They won’t. And even if they do, my old “normal” was still an addiction. I’ve often grappled with the idea of being addicted to technology: I try to rationalize that it’s not an addiction if everyone acts the same way. And on general principle, it scares me that something so small and innocuous holds such a stranglehold over my life and my behavior. In the past year, approximately 20% of my life has been dedicated to Steve Jobs’ brainchild. What has that fifth of my life brought me? Sure, there are some texts and calls which have been invaluable for both professional purposes and keeping up with friends and family.

 Besides that, however, it’s been a constant stream of instant gratification: crowdsourcing my self-esteem through Instagram likes, Retweets validating my wit, Snapchat notifications reminding me I’m someone worth keeping in touch with. Every one of those notifications hits my brain and spurs a dopamine rush, tethering me further to my phone.

 That’s not to mention the information overload. I liken the information on my phone to a flood. Initially, the first few factual raindrops refresh my brain, giving it the nutrients necessary for enrichment and survival. The marginal returns diminish significantly after those first couple drops, however. My brain becomes flooded by the colossal rainwaters of incessant information, with each little piece trying to find a home in my brain but displaced by the utter lack of room. Yet, since there’s nowhere else to go, it stays within my brain, muddying its waters and weakening the roots of the other knowledge already ingrained.

 It’s weird: Phones have never been more necessary for survival or entertainment than the past few weeks, and yet I’ve never been more wary of them. Each time I grab my phone, I get the same sense of satisfaction and relief as always. Alongside those emotions, however, I now experience a sharp pang of guilt. I know that with weeks and potentially months of little to do, there’s an implicit responsibility to battle this dissonance. But why try if it’s a losing battle?

 This requires a finer examination of the term “losing”. I don’t expect to eliminate phone usage, as it’ll remain a part of my daily life. I’m no technophobe; I recognize my phone’s importance to participating as a member of my local and global communities and staying up to date on important information. How about all those mindless reaches for my phone? Or deriving a disproportionate amount of my self-worth from what people think of me online?

 Thankfully, I have a plan to combat these pitfalls: intentionality. If I can ask myself “Why?” before doing anything on my phone and have a valid answer, then it’s worth using my phone. Hopefully, however, I can catch myself when I’m using my phone simply for the sake of using it. The thought of slowly reclaiming these aimless parts of my days provides hope in an otherwise uncertain time. Even if I can’t control the world around me, I can at least control a little more of my own life.

Running with others is one of my greatest joys in life. The act of running itself is a breathtaking experience, an opportunity to escape the doldrums of everyday life. But getting to run with my friends and teammates offers the fun of running with an unparalleled discussion space. Being with people for sixty-plus minutes day after day allows you to learn a lot about your friends and delve into some interesting conversations. Off the top of my head, I remember the entire week my high school team and I casted ourselves as Star Wars characters (both prequels and originals) and my Duke teammate Rory’s Turkey day tale to remember.

That brings me to today. Over the past couple weeks, I had a blast catching up with my high school teammates. They’re some of my best friends in the whole world, and getting to run around our old stomping grounds together will never get old. With each passing day, however, I grappled more with my responsibility to limit the spread of coronavirus. I watched my good friend and teammate Thomas isolate himself and not run with us. At first, we joked about “Quarantom” and how we’d never see him again. In my head, though, I realized that if Thomas, one of the smartest and most rational people I know, was going to this extreme, then maybe I should too. Surely, runs became less and less enjoyable as I struggled with the cognitive dissonance of doing something I shouldn’t be doing: Was the joy of matching stride for stride with my friends worth risking my health, their health, or my family’s health?

Ultimately, I realized the answer to this was no. And with that, I decided to stop running with others for the foreseeable future. Frankly, I should’ve done this a while back. My dad is 64 and asthmatic, putting him firmly at-risk. Prioritizing my runs ahead of his health was irresponsible, but I’m optimistic that I fixed my mistake before it was too late.

I hope others can make that same step. Yeah, “None of us have it, so why should we worry about it right now?” I get it. But all it takes is one person getting it for poop to hit the proverbial fan. Let’s just say you get it from the social transmission involved with running and go on to spread it to your family. Suddenly, your whole family’s dealing with coronavirus because you couldn’t suck it up enough to run alone. That’s an extreme example, but a possible one nonetheless, especially considering its asymptomatic manifestations in younger people.

Let me reiterate: Running with others is one of my greatest joys in life. The silence will be deafening on the runs over the next few months (maybe weeks, if we take enough collective action), with the disproportionately loud sound of my footsteps replacing haughty laughter and spirited debates. But if this is what it takes to do my small part in bringing things back to normal, to ensure I have a cross-country season to come back to, and to keep me, my friends, and most importantly my family healthy, then so be it.

 

Two weeks ago, I was building up mileage in anticipation of chasing the ACC outdoor standard for the 1500. It was a tough task for sure–it would require shaving 8 seconds off my equivalent time from indoors. But each new season brings new hope, and after a disappointing finish to my winter season I was filled with that renewed optimism. I knew coronavirus existed, and while rumors abounded about maybe getting an extra week of spring break, nobody was quite yet sure of its real ramifications.

Now, two weeks seems like a lifetime ago. A lot has happened since then. Like, a lot a lot. One such happening is the cancellation of the NCAA outdoor track season (along with all other winter and spring sports). This is relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, especially since track is a non-revenue sport, but for runners like me, and especially for my teammates and competitors whose careers had to end on this underwhelming note, it sucks.

We’re forced to look ahead to next cross-country season. That might sound like it’s really far away. Well, that’s because it is really far away. But beyond the delayed gratification for our collective training and efforts, I think this forced off-season will cause a few irregularities for the upcoming cross-country season (I’m operating under the assumption that XC will go on as normal, because while there is a chance COVID-19 disrupts our daily lives beyond this spring and summer, it’s not productive to operate under that assumption. Moreover, I think Jonathan Marcus’ tweet warning about the eventual cancellation of the entire athletic season next year, though possible, falls under needless fear-mongering.)

Anyways, I believe this lost season will cause the following (among many more) changes for NCAA running.

Roster compositions will change: This one is pretty obvious, with all athletes gaining an extra year of spring eligibility. For some graduating seniors, this does little to alleviate the pain of their lost final season. They already have jobs lined up and lives planned out; they can’t afford to return to college for a final shot at glory. However, for seniors who already had a redshirt accumulated, this changes the calculus for whether it’s worth returning for a fifth year. Is it worth returning for just a cross-country or indoor season? Maybe, but that’s one year of school for only one competitive season (out of three). But add an outdoor season to one (or both) of those seasons, and suddenly returning to school seems like a much more convincing option.

Of course, this creates logistical difficulties as well, namely scholarship money. Teams didn’t anticipate these runners coming back, and accordingly didn’t allocate scholarship money for them.

The past week has been a blur. Hell, that might be an understatement. Each day feels progressively more like a clusterfuck than the last, an impressive feat when every day feels like peak calamity already. Traditions once as much of a given as death and taxes–March Madness, the Boston Marathon, Coachella–have gone dark quicker than Donald Trump can tweet. Everybody’s on edge; there’s no worse feeling in the world than having no control whatsoever, and right now the whole world is feeling that learned helplessness.

With that backdrop, running seems relatively insignificant. Who cares about mileage and training when an actual pandemic is afoot? But for me and many others, it represents an iota of control we still have over our own lives. Sure, they can stop us from going back to school (and with good reason, I’m obviously not debating any of these measures). They can stop us from traveling anywhere. They can stop us from attending sports games and concerts. What they can’t take from us, however, is our running.

For those beautiful moments we run every day, we forget that we’re living in perhaps the most uncertain times thus far in our lives. Every sensation associated with running–the pain, the adrenaline, the feeling of seemingly floating on air–feels the exact same way it did before any of this happened. And that’s the beauty of running. They can take just about anything from me, but damn it, they can’t take my running. It’s the nostalgia for better times, the self-medication to make me forget (if only for a brief second), the one thing I can control right now in an otherwise unpredictable world.

Let’s fast forward the clock to September. Everything won’t be completely back to normal: How could it after something like this? But given everything that occurred, we’re as close to normal as we could’ve possibly imagined. Students are returning back to school, while adults are remembering what a physical workspace feels like. And we get back to campus, reminiscing over the good, the bad, and the ugly that we’ve felt over the past few months. We lament how the careers of our seniors ended so unceremoniously–if that was the end for them, they deserved a hell of a lot better. We prepare for another cross-country season, with everyone greatly anticipating it to get back to some sense of normalcy. Most of all, though, we thank running. It might just be sixty minutes each day. But that hour gave us power, in a time when we seemed powerless to do anything.

I had sworn for years to never visit a Buffalo Wild Wings. Corporate trash, I said. Why go to a Buffalo Wild Wings when you can support a local place, I asked. But desperate times call for desperate measures: Stuck in South Bend, Indiana, with nothing to do but eat in a variety of chain restaurants in a strip mall or play an elaborate game of hide-and-go-seek with Pete Buttigieg, I ended up breaking my own vow.

 

At first, the inside of the BWW was a welcome respite from the hellscape known as South Bend in the Winter. Quickly, it became anything but. We waited for what seemed to be an eternity to be seated, despite the abundance of open tables throughout the spacious restaurant.

We were eventually seated, cramming 8 people into a 4 person booth. Because we were in a rush, we placed our orders quickly, as their well-organized menu made it easy to sort between overpriced wing options.

Meanwhile, my teammates and I enjoyed each other’s company, watching a couple of old guys play poker and a Drake University basketball game. Was there anything better on? No, there definitely wasn’t a Duke-UVA basketball game could we watch. Nor did we ask to watch anything better, like some hypothetical Duke-UVA game. Why would we, a bunch of Duke students, have any interest in that game?

The clock was ticking against our deadline: We had thirty minutes left, which might seem like more than enough time. And for some, it was. But for guys like CJ, who decided to test both their stomachs and their wallets with an order of 30 wings, time was of the essence. Minute after minute went by, with no sign of our food. Our waiter came by, letting us know that our food would be out shortly. Since we were in a rush, however, we asked for our checks to expedite the post-meal process.

Ten minutes after our waiter’s initial reassurance, we waited for our food, which seemed like it was never going to come. Then, a sign of life came: our waiter. Our wings will be out shortly, he told us. Where had we heard that before? Meanwhile, he collected our checks before we had even gotten a morsel of food. Customer service at its finest.

Another five minutes passed, and eventually, our food did come. It was 6:42, approximately 50 minutes after we had ordered and 13 minutes before we had to get on the box. So, we had to ask for to-go boxes as the staff delivered our food, which they delivered in an infinitesimal fraction of the time it took them to actually deliver our food.

A long wait on empty stomachs should make the payoff good, right? It surely took that long because they were putting as much love and care into our food as possible; they would never spend 50 minutes to heat pre-prepared food. Alas, the food was just as mediocre as our whole damn experience. I ordered 20 wings, which were alright, but thoroughly underwhelming for a restaurant that builds its entire brand on good wings. I also placed an order for fries that never showed up, which was perhaps a microcosm for my whole experience.

In total, I paid $31 (including tip, I understand that the restaurant industry sucks and that it was probably not the waiter’s fault) for 20 of the most average wings of my life and fries that never made it to our table. Add in horrendous service, and I at least got one positive out of my whole experience: I’m a lot more resolute in my desire to never go to a Buffalo Wild Wings again.

Ratings: Out of 5 Stars

Flavor:🌟🌟

Size:🌟🌟

Sauce Variety:🌟🌟🌟🌟

Service/Ambiance:🌟

Price:🌟

Overall:🌟

Everyone not living under a rock has heard the bad news by now. Hell, it might’ve gotten through to the people living under a rock too. There’s a certain shock to anyone dying, but especially someone larger than life like Kobe. What qualities would you associate with life? Passion, energy, vivaciousness? Kobe embodied all of those. And for a college student whose Mamba Mentality throughout any given year sums up to a fraction of what Kobe had in a day, it’s a sobering reminder of my mortality. This was the face of a generation of sports. The strongest. The best. And he’s gone, just like that. If he’s not safe from death, then I’m sure as hell not.

I can’t memorialize Kobe any better than those who knew and loved him did. All I did was catch a couple of highlights on ESPN when I was maybe 14. His teammates, coaches, friends, and family have offered gut-wrenching yet beautiful tributes. Yet, though I cannot offer anything new to say about Kobe, we can all stand to learn a bit from it. To quote Marcellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction, “That’s pride fucking with you.” We often hesitate to say what we really mean to those we really care about, all because we don’t want to be in a position of vulnerability. But guess what? Pride doesn’t mean shit if you’re dead. If Kobe died in an instant; we can too. So tell your loved ones that you love them. Check up on your friends and let them know what they really mean to you. Life really is this precious, so that’s what I’ll be doing tonight.

Being a member of the Duke Cross Country team has myriad benefits. I get to pursue my passion for running at a major Division 1 institution, travel to different parts of the country to race, and get a bunch of cool, free Nike gear. An under-appreciated aspect of being on the team, though, is that I didn’t have to worry about making friends coming into Duke. Most people have to make a mad scramble for friends in the first week, contorting their personalities to be as likable as possible even if it means eschewing their fun little idiosyncrasies. Most of the time, that works out fine, even if it requires becoming a generic robot for orientation week. But luckily for me, I didn’t have to deal with any anxiety about potentially coming to college and not faring well socially—by virtue of being on the track team, I already had 20 friends.

Even more for me (and my tastebuds), some of these friends are talented chefs who can put their own spin on wings and invite me over to try said wings. That brings me to last week. Approaching the end of a difficult but rewarding track season, my teammate Nico invited the entire mid-distance crew over to his apartment for a celebratory dinner.

A connoisseur and chef of fine foods (how many college students have cookbooks lying around their apartments?), he backed up this description when he decided to make wings, perhaps the most prominent staple of fine dining nationwide. Though some of my teammates thought he was desperately trying to gain exposure on my blog, I couldn’t have been more overjoyed by his dinner choice. Sure, his culinary career will benefit immensely from my *ignores actual view count* millions of faithful readers, but who am I to care so long as my stomach is satisfied?

And boy, was my stomach satisfied. With the help of cooking assistants Will and Matt, two seemingly incompetent but actually pretty helpful chefs (Matt would be the first to bring up that both his parents are professional chefs), Nico concocted a variety of sauces for his wings.

First was a sauce inspired by Indian cuisine. Typically, although I enjoy Indian food, it’s not my first choice. But bringing its distinct, curry-like flavor to wings was a bold, creative decision that I greatly enjoyed. Its richness complemented the flavor of the more typical hot wings, which were not overly spicy yet still were hot enough to tickle my tastebuds. Nico cooked these wings in his oven, bringing them up to suitable temperature and crispiness. And though these wings were fairly small, he more than made up for that with sheer quantity (if it’s too many wings for 9 collegiate athletes, it’s a lot of wings.) 

 Is this post really about the wings? Kinda, yeah. Because those were some really flipping good wings. But it’s about more than the wings, too. It’s about my friend and teammate Nico, who didn’t tire enough of our faces after countless track sessions to graciously have us over for a really good dinner. It’s about my teammates, who welcomed and accepted me and my fellow freshmen and made our freshman year a year to remember. And it’s about dinner as a whole—there really is no better way to get together and celebrate with friends and family than over good food. Especially if it just so happens to be wings.

A visit to the Peanut Bar feels like a trip to a bygone era. It’s the kind of place you conjure in your mind when your grandparents talk about their favorite restaurants of yesteryear, back in the good old days when a Coke would only cost a nickel and a good sandwich a dime. Yet despite this nostalgic vibe, stemming from its Prohibition Era origins, its wings remain relevant and spectacular almost twenty years into the 21st century. After eating wings at the Peanut Bar, a Reading staple, the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” never resonated so much.

As its name suggests, the restaurant has built its reputation on peanuts. Cracked peanut shells litter the floors, eschewing any sense of formality. Each table receives unlimited peanuts, and patrons are not just permitted, but encouraged to throw their shells on the floor.

Besides peanuts, The Peanut Bar’s reputation comes from its pub food, especially its wings. On its website, it claims that USA Today called it one of the top ten wing places in America, though a quick Google search yielded no verification of this claim. But do its wings hold up to their lofty rank?

To investigate this pressing matter, a few friends and I ventured across the Penn Street bridge and into Reading to try the vaunted wings. It was a Monday night, when for $10.95 plus a beverage purchase, you can eat all the wings you’d like. The Peanut Bar is rare in offering two all-you-can-eat wing nights weekly (Monday and Thursday), as opposed to the typical one. On any other night, an unspecified number of wings (most likely eight) would cost $9.99, a comparatively expensive price.

As I sat down at our table, I absorbed the oldness of the place—the Peanut Bar has been feeding hungry customers since the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time in office. Our waitress immediately asked us whether we were here for the wing night. I guess as a bunch of young, mildly obnoxious guys, we fit the usual clientele.

We were not given peanuts (or sufficient napkins for that matter) at our table. Overall, the lack of peanuts did not detract much from our meal, and made sense since the restaurant was closing soon. Still, given that its name is the Peanut Bar, I would’ve gone nuts for some (okay sorry, that pun was too easy).

Without hesitation, I ordered buffalo wings for my first batch. It was not a hard choice, given their paltry selection of three sauces: buffalo, garlic herb, and barbecue. Coming in a plate with a built-in dish for blue cheese or ranch, the wings were coated in a buttery, orange sauce. They were not spicy, at least compared to the heat people expect from buffalo wings. Heat-seekers would most likely return home disappointed.

Yet, these wings exceeded all expectations: In place of the stereotypical heat associated with wings, the sauce’s butter combined with the buffalo sauce to create a glorious fusion of savoriness with enough heat to keep people on their toes. They also had plentiful meat to carry the rich taste, and a pool of sauce formed at the bottom of the plate for those who wanted more. A consensus of satisfaction emerged from our table, with all but one meager-stomached boy going for round two.

I placed an order of barbecue wings to follow my initial order of buffalo wings. They came quickly and were good, if not a little too drenched in sauce. Nothing was exceptional about their taste, but they proved sufficiently tangy, providing an effective complement to the buttery, spicier taste of the buffalo wings.

Overall, I was very satisfied with my wing-eating experience at the Peanut Bar. Aside from a few hiccups in service and a sauce offering less diverse than even Mark Zuckerberg’s wardrobe, it offered everything you could ask for from a wing place: Good wings, good prices, and good friends (I had to find the latter on my own).

Berks County has a surprisingly deep history, from housing Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather to nurturing the career of a young singer named Taylor Swift. So, when a restaurant encapsulates itself in Berks County’s rich history, it must be doing something right. And after eating the Peanut Bar’s wings, I can firmly attest that they do wings right.

Flavor:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Size:⭐⭐⭐⭐

Sauce Variety:⭐⭐

Service/Ambiance:⭐⭐⭐⭐

Price:⭐⭐⭐⭐

Overall:⭐⭐⭐⭐

College students + good wings = profit. A little simplistic of an equation? Sure, but for the most part, if you put hungry college students around great food, it’ll work out. Case in point: Heavenly Buffaloes.

A five-minute walk from my dorm on Duke’s freshman quad, East Campus, “Heav Buffs” (as the wing joint is affectionately known) is not a conventional restaurant. There’s no seating inside—and really little seating at all, only a few tables to the side of the shack in which the restaurant is situated.

As such, Heavenly Buffaloes really bets on the quality of its food. Lacking the attractions of a typical restaurant, people come to Heav Buffs for one sole reason: the wings. And let me tell you, they deliver.

Making the arduous 5 minute trek from my dorm (it really says something that I run college cross-country and making it to Heav Buffs is still the most difficult journey of my day), Heav Buffs greets me with its array of zany lights and reggae music over the speakers. Don’t let its lack of conventionality fool you: The restaurant still has charm, and in spades.

Adhering to a Rastafarian theme, the restaurant has a mellow, laid-back ambiance. The staff members are friendly and personable as well, adopting Heav Buffs’ relaxed vibe. It perfectly fits their target clientele, too: People don’t eat wings when they want a fancy meal out. Wings are for decompressing, for spending time with friends and family, for watching a big game or hosting a big party.

Normally, I go for boneless wings at Heav Buffs. Blasphemous, I know. Heav Buffs is the only place where I opt for boneless wings instead of their more authentic counterparts, but that’s only because they do them so damn well. For the sake of consistency, though, I’ll go for actual wings tonight.

One distinct aspect of the restaurant is the prices. Initially, they are reasonable: 7 wings for $7.49 is a common price. But as the quantities of wings increase, per-wing prices do not decrease accordingly as is typical at other restaurants. For example, prices start at $1.07 per wing for 7, but only drop to $0.97 per wing even if you order a whopping 251 wings!

Heav Buffs offers 26 home-made sauces, nineteen of which are wet sauces and the other seven dry sauces. Some of the most unusual sauces include Carolina Honey Mustard, Sweet Thai Coconut Chili, and Sweet Mesquite BBQ. Although I don’t order them, the different types of typical hot wings offered at Heav Buffs are generally well-liked. I shy away from them due to their vinegar base, but even the milder versions pack a good amount of heat. I personally opted for a split order of the Heavenly Buffalo dry rub and the Chipotle BBQ wet sauce.

After a 20 minute wait, I get my order, and it is clear Heavenly Buffaloes is serious about optimizing the science of wing-eating. They make sure to emphasize all of the smaller details of wing-eating that other restaurants sometimes ignore. Each order is neatly packaged with moist towelettes, a fork and napkins, along with the complimentary celery and blue cheese/ranch.

The wings themselves are stupendously good. Starting with the restaurant’s namesake sauce, the Heavenly Buffalo dry rub is not your typical buffalo flavor. It packs a little bit of heat, but its main appeal is its rich and zesty flavor. Moreover, the dry rub contributes to its unique taste. Instead of having the sauce slide across your tongue like normal wet sauces, it dissolves into your tongue like an evaporated hot sauce.

Not to be outdone, the Chipotle BBQ sauce resembles a normal BBQ sauce upon first entering the mouth, but then reveals a spicy kick. Its heat does not seem serious at first, but adds up after a few wings. The spiciness also accentuates the tanginess of the BBQ sauce in order to create a vibrant taste, combining southern barbecue with Mexican spice to deliver fireworks to your tastebuds.

Size-wise, these wings are among the meatiest I’ve ever eaten. They were absolute units, each wing consistently thick with meat no matter its shape. However they got wings so big—anabolic steroids, lifting with Arnold Schwarzenegger, or some combination of the two—they’re to be applauded for their size.

Overall, Heavenly Buffaloes has an eclectic bunch of mouth-watering sauces to pair with high quality chicken. Not only does Heavenly Buffaloes have good food, but it also has the charm and friendly service befitting of an upstart, locally-renowned restaurant. As such, a trip to Durham isn’t complete without a trip to Heavenly Buffaloes: Heavenly Buffaloes is one of the few restaurants for which putting “Heavenly” in its name is accurate, and not just blatant hyperbole.

Ratings (Out of 5 Stars)

Flavor:🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Size:🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Sauce Variety:🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Service/Ambiance:🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Price:🌟🌟🌟

Overall:🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

 

 

 

 

Duke’s West Union is a beautiful place. No, seriously. A college dining hall is the last place you would expect to be an architectural marvel, but in the world of billion dollar endowments, opulent buildings such as WU (as West Union is affectionately known) are our reality here at Duke.

Expectations are raised with such an over-the-top design. To make such a grand building and fill it with McDonald’s and Taco Bell would be akin to filling a Ferrari with only the lowest-quality gas. So, it should not come as a surprise that the food is crazy good. Even as a freshman trying to stretch out his food points to last the whole semester, I had tried the whole selection of locally-owned restaurants that fill West Union. Or so I thought.

After a friend came upstairs to WU’s main level with a burger, I was surprised—there are no burger places in WU! Well, per the usual, I was wrong. Downstairs, hidden behind some doors stood The Devil’s Krafthouse.

As the name suggests, Krafthouse’s claim to fame is its craft beers. Being only 19, I could not test them out (nobody under the age of 21 drinks anyways… right?) But for anyone in a pickle like me or just plain hungry, they also have a bevy of pub foods. Sandwiches, burgers, and—yes, it took me this long to get to it—wings. 

Starved coming out of a quick meeting, I rushed downstairs and placed my order for wings at the counter. Krafthouse offers an alright, but unspectacular stable of five sauces: Buffalo, sweet chili, BBQ, garlic parmesean, and lemon pepper. Intent on getting the most conventional wing experience, I chose buffalo. In the mean time, I soaked up the atmosphere of the restaurant. Though I was there alone, the restaurant buzzed with energy, with most patrons intently watching Duke take on Boston College in basketball. Seating was hard to come by, a testament to both the spot’s popularity and the empty stomachs of college students at seven in the evening. Nonetheless, I eventually found a small, two-person table near the counter.

The service was quick, having my wings ready in 10 minutes (I can’t tell whether that’s a good or bad thing. As hungry as I was, I wonder where the line is between quick service and making fresh, not quickly-heated wings). My plate came with 8 wings and blue cheese. For $8, that’s a really reasonable price, especially considering my food points are already a sunk cost. That said, carrots or celery would have complemented the blue cheese really well. Lacking them as vessels for the blue cheese threw me off initially, given their presence at most wing places. 

As for the wings themselves, they were coated with a hot sauce as well as flakes of pepper. The sauce was unevenly distributed, such that some wings suffered from too much sauce and others failed to pack even a morsel of heat. Although the pepper mildly compensated for the lack of sauce in some places, a few wings were still basically naked. Where hot sauce did coat the wing, its heat played with your mouth a bit. It wasn’t very hot, and that’s coming from someone with little heat tolerance. But the pepper and hot sauce combined to form a rich, if moderate heat that provided satisfaction with every bite. Moreover, each wing had a moderate amount of meat: No wing gave a ton of meat, nor did one cheat me.

Overall, the wings were pretty solid. Nothing was amazing about them, but nothing was too bad, either. The lack of celery/carrots for the blue cheese, as well as the uneven sauce distribution effectively rendering some wings naked, were turn-offs. But for a reasonable price at one of the most convenient spots on campus, I have a hunch that more wing stops at Krafthouse are in my future.

Ratings: Out of 5 Stars

Flavor:🌟🌟🌟

Size:🌟🌟🌟

Sauce Variety:🌟🌟

Service/Ambiance:🌟🌟🌟

Price:🌟🌟🌟🌟

Overall:🌟🌟🌟