1702

Photo courtesy of Lara Muncaster

Last night I visited 1702, a pizza bar in Tucson, AZ. Yes, the address is the name of the restaurant. 1702 is described as Tucson's beer Mecca, with good reason. Sporting a variety of more than 50 beers from major and micro-brewers around the world, if you claim to be a person that doesn't like beer, you can find something that you will enjoy there.
As you may have guessed, they do serve wings there. The wings go for $4.80 for half a pound (6 wings) and come in hot and bbq with a choice of ranch or bleu cheese on the side, but no celery. I went for the hot variety last night.
The wings are a proper size (about 3 inches each) and are prepared in a deep fryer, which is a step up from when they used to pan fry them. The deep fry gives them a proper crisp to the skin instead of the slimy finish that comes from pan frying. Unfortunately, that's pretty much where the compliments stop. These wings get ruined by their sauce. The sauce appears to be a mixture of butter, Tabasco sauce, red pepper flakes, black pepper, some kind of jalapeno sauce and an obscene amount of cayenne pepper. It hits the back of your throat first and then creeps forward to make your lips feel like they're on fire. If you ever need an incentive to want to cut off your lips, eating this sauce could be a great motivation. About half way through the meal it felt like I could start to breathe fire at any moment. This sauce suffers from a classic case of sacrificing flavor to be hot just for the sake of being hot. I love hot wing sauces, but only when there is a flavor that makes me want to come back to the heat. If I'm suffering through heat for no reward, then what's the point? That heat continued for 12 minutes after I finished eating, and I ate my leftover bleu cheese with a spoon to try to get rid of the essence of the sauce. I've never done that in all of the years I've been eating wings.
The final say on these wings is that they should keep the current method of cooking the wings but bring back the old hot sauce, which had flavor and was an enjoyable heat. The wings end up rating a 2 out of 5 for good preparation but poor execution with the sauce. Sticking to the oversize slices of pizza and excellent selection of beer is a better route to take when visiting 1702.

Check them out here.
www.1702az.com 520-325-1702

Until next time, just wing it.