A month removed from a marathon effort setting a pair of world records by selling more than 48,000 buffalo chicken wings in a 24-hour period, Wyoming-based Weitzels Wings repeated as Festival Favorite on Sunday at the National Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo, New York.
Being named Festival Favorite means the "Double Dubs" team has been voted by avid fans of Buffalo chicken wings as their go-to wing, something founder Trent Weitzel said is a testament to his crew.
"It's just amazing, and it was everybody involved in my crew, they're the ones who earned Festival Favorite," he told Cowboy State Daily on Sunday evening. "This is the people's choice award, which means everybody coming through the door ... they come to Double Dubs."
Along with Sunday's Festival Favorite to cap off the weekend-long competition, the “Double Dubs” crew won a pair of judged awards for their signature sauces Saturday.
It repeated as the 2023 second place winner for Hot Traditional Wing Sauce and also placed second in Creative Spicy Wing Sauce. This year’s showing continues an impressive run as it's become one of the nation’s premiere chicken wing joints.
In nine trips to the Super Bowl of Buffalo chicken wings, Double Dubs has now won 21 awards, including another award Sunday competing against 40 other restaurants to create the best Sriracha-based sauce, Weitzel said.
Sunday's surprise hit for Double Dubs was a special wing sauce created by Weitzel's 12-year-old daughter that makes a chicken wing taste like a Big Mac, he said.
It's the KSS, short for Kadyn’s Secret Sauce.
“That’s my daughter’s invention,” Weitzel told Cowboy State Daily before leaving for the festival. “She was playing with the sauces and created it, and I thought, ‘Holy cow, that kind of tastes like a Big Mac.’ Then when we put pickles and sesame seeds on it, it really does.”
Sweet Repeat
Winning Festival Favorite last year was a first for the Laramie wing wizard, but the pressure — and success — in repeating is what Weitzel thrives on.
“I definitely have a target on my back this go-around,” he said about going into Buffalo as the reigning Festival Favorite. “The first couple of years we were the underdogs, just this little, small place from Wyoming.”
The Menu
Of the sauces Double Dubs featured at this year’s festival, its WWIII hot traditional Buffalo sauce continues to be consistently excellent. It’s won second place twice in a row.
The creative spicy sauce he created for the contest is a bacon green chili wing that features fresh Hatch green chilis roasted on the spot.
That made a huge impression, Weitzel said.
"Some of my friends in Wyoming came and helped roast the green chilis, and they killed it," he said. "Not many people from western New York had ever seen anything like that."
With more hardware from the wing fest, the world records and being featured in May 2022 on the hit Food Network show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dive,” Double Dubs now challenges itself to not “get stagnant or stale,” Weitzel has said. “We’re always trying to do something new and be in the public’s eye.”
The
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
