A quest for a good chicken wing (Duff's Wings - 558 College, Toronto)

I cannot deny.. I like the wing. I like the stupidly hot wing. Me and Pinto went to Duff's Wings. I had really high hopes that I would be running out of there with steam coming out of my ears and frantically looking for a wax candle to pour all over my tongue. I know that the equivalent of Guatemalan insanity peppers exist (awesome Simpson's episode by the way), but there has never been a suicide wing sauce that I couldn't eat. I'm going to be sorry one day, but I generally order suicide or hot with a side of suicide on the side that I liberally dip through.

So there is something called the Scoville Heat Unit and there is this place called Duff's. I'm calling bullshit.

I approached the first opportunity to peg my diet in SHU's with trepidation and a kind of a strange giddiness. Duff's try really hard to scare the crap out of you about spiciness and without a reference point, I stupidly bought into their propaganda. We ordered "Hot" wings with a side of "Superhot". The wings themselves were pretty good in terms of meat and level of cooking, but the sauce was garbage. The hot sauce tasted like Frank's sauce and vinegar and the superhot sauce was like vinegar concentrate. Garbage. You could barely put your nose over it (like a saucepan of burning vinegar might smell, I imagine). So we skipped over "Death" and got a side of "Armageddon". My big chance to "see through time".

This was the only sauce of the three that we tried that actually tasted anything near what I would call "good". It was rich, not butter based and taste-eeee. .... and ouch-eeee. It was really hot. It kind of snuck (Snuck is one of those words that I look at these days and ask whether or not its right) up on me, but I couldn't stop eating it somehow. I was shoveling the stuff into my mouth and making stupid sweat stains on my hoodie as I wiped my brow. (well for 6 wings or so).

So they were the hottest wings that I have purchased from a restaurant, but this was not the hottest sauce that I have had by far. I guess thats where the BS call comes in. It would be almost impossible for me to eat a wing that was heavily doused with Dave's Insanity Sauce, for instance ("rated" far less than these sauces). Or read this review of a 300,000 SHU sauce - "Pour it on a buffalo wing and go for it! If your butt doesn't bleed the next morning, you didn't use enough."

So either Scoville units are so unreliable that "spicy" and "bleeding out your ass" exist on the same stratum, or I went on a bad night to the wrong location, or, or, or.

I'll go back, I will order the armageddon off the top and maybe find out that I think that I am cooler than I really am. ....

Or maybe Duff's is a lying sack of scoville optimism.

So I want hot, tasty wings in Toronto. Who's buying? Who's selling?