Anthracite Café is the type of place you go when you want a great beer selection along with some delicious wings. In our past visits, people were lined up outside the door waiting for a table. This time around, there was no such wait. This may have been a factor of our early arrival, or the fact that they recently added a new dining area called the Coal Bin. Regardless, we walked in and found a seat at the bar instantly. It’s crazy how fast we sat down, placed our order, and got our wings. It all occurred within a span of about 10 minutes! Our bartender was always on top of our food and beverage needs. too He was one of the friendliest and coolest bartenders out there. We’ve never had a bad experience at Anthracite Café, and this visit just solidified that tradition.
Anthracite Café offers some pretty meaty wings at fifty cents. They do require minimum orders of six wings, but then you can order any amount over that, such as an order of eight or nine wings. Trying to stick with my usual routine of 4 different flavors, I ended up with a total of 24 wings. Let me just say now that I came nowhere near that goal. The point is, if you’re usually a person who takes down 20 wings, order the 18 and you’ll be just fine.
The amount of wing options at Anthracite Café is almost paralyzing. They offer around 50 different varieties! In addition to the normal selection, they even offer featured wings on their wing night. For our visit, the features were Creamy Bacon Horseradish and Slap Your Mama, which was described to us as a smoked, bleu cheese hot wing. Anthracite Café does give some crazy names to their wings, such as Cowboy or Cactus. I do wish they provided a description of the wing on the menu, but if you ask your bartender or server, they should be able to point you in the right direction.
I decided to get a little adventurous during our visit and ordered some out-of-the-box flavors. The Cactus was a southwest style sauce that reminded me very much of a cooler ranch Dorito. It wasn’t too spicy and provided a wallop of great flavor. The Porketta were a dry rub wing covered in your traditional Porketta seasoning. While I loved the idea of these wings, I wish they could have had a more of the seasoning coating the wing. It seemed to be lacking some of that flavor that I look for in Porketta. The Slap Your Mama sauce was much spicier than I expected. It did provide a small amount of smokiness with a hint of Bleu Cheese flavor, but the biggest hitter in the sauce was the spiciness. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the wing. In fact, this may have been my favorite wing in the bunch. Finally, I had the Smoking Gun. The bartender described it as a bacon-infused hot sauce. This wing had a very slight tinge of smokiness along with the hot sauce flavor. I got a bit of BBQ sauce taste from it, too. It is a very unique wing with a complex flavor. It seemed as though all the wings had sauce drizzled over top instead of being tossed in the sauce. If you’re like myself and prefer your wings smothered in sauce, look to the bottom of your basket because you may luck out with extra sauce there.
The Anthracite Café is the kind of place that caters to everyone. You could bring your whole family for dinner, you could go there with a buddy to watch a game, you could go there by yourself if everyone exiled you because either way you’re going to have a great time. The atmosphere is that good. Not an ounce of negative vibes to be had. We sat at the bar and our server/bartender was super nice, funny and informative. He checked up on us several times and gave us the lowdown on their wing flavors. This guy cared and it showed.
Large and in charge is my take away with size of the wings. They are some of the biggest we’ve ever encountered. Big meaty, triumphant wings are what you get here and for 50 cents, they’re well worth their weight in gold teeth. Strictly gold teeth.
They have so many flavors that I simply can’t name them all. There’s somewhere between 30-40 different flavors to choose from. They have your traditional styles of course but then their creativity gets put on display with flavors such as fu manchu, karate kid and cactus. They also have a few dry rubs to select from and even a new feature, where they have some special flavors that they rotate weekly that aren’t on the menu. I will note, with some of the unique names on the menu, don’t be shy about asking what they are. Trust me; they’ll have no problem letting you in to their wild minds.
Fu Manchu, which is their blend of ranch and soy sauce really was great. The saltiness of the soy sauce mixed with the cooling effect of the ranch is different from most sauces. Old bay butter garlic is a style that the Anthracite knocks out of the park. And the reason why is that they use big chunks of real garlic. They’re sufficiently buttered and the old bay seasoning is a solid choice to add to this classic flavor. Next, I got the bacon ranch dry rub and it was good combination of flavors but like a lot of dry rubs I get, I needed just a bit more seasoning. Finally, I went off menu and ordered from their special flavors that they rotate weekly and went with creamy bacon horseradish. I’ve only seen this flavor one other time and the Anthracite represents it very well. The creaminess and sinus clearing sting of the horseradish is great on its own. But then adding the bacon to it and well, it’s just the tops.
