San Antonio Taco Company is best known for ice buckets of beer and dense orange queso, the stuff of nostalgia for two generations of Vandy grads. In its nearly 40 years of operation, SATCO has also earned a sort of cult following for its crispy and well-sauced Buffalo wings.
“THERE’S JUST SOMETHING ABOUT DISCOVERING a hidden gem that makes you feel downright superior to others, a god among lowly mortals,” writes Adam Kurtz. He starts his review with a meditation on expectations and ends it by awarding SATCO a respectable 8 out of 10.
“Perfect fry job,” Kurtz tells the Scene as he makes his way through a drumstick (a “one-boner”). “It’s crispy — that’s how it’s supposed to be. Saucy. This is exciting. My only comment is that I wish they had more sauces.”
His Instagram account — the Wingdom™ (@thewingdomreview) — is closing in on 2,000 followers. College in upstate New York helped Kurtz build his palate. His dad gave him a George Foreman Grill in college, which he promptly traded in for a deep fryer. Life as a touring pedal-steel guitarist allows Kurtz regular access to new spots around the country, and having bandmates means he can try even more orders of wings — the perfect shareable.
“You got to just tell it like it is,” says Kurtz, beard flecked with Buffalo sauce, explaining his simple philosophy. “Making wings is not hard. You just have to care. You have to like wings, and know what’s good. The perfect wing is super crispy on the outside, and it’s saucy. The chicken is juicy and moist.”
Kurtz has built a respected platform of chicken criticism using a few principles that should guide any independent media: Define the scope, earn trust, develop a voice, and stick to the mission. His specific flavor of rant-review often incorporates tangents on society, politics, sex, childhood trauma and human nature. I know at least one vegetarian who follows him. If Kurtz has one discernible mission, it’s to push others to fry better wings. He does this through a combination of shame and praise, an act of public service that improves the overall quality of wings across the city.
“I have considered running for mayor,” Kurtz tells the Scene, close to finishing his order at SATCO. “My platform will have two parts: All wings have to be good, and country music has to have pedal steel. Otherwise it’s not country music. Legally.”
If Kurtz wanted to eat the best wings, he’d simply stick to his own recipe, refined over decades, around which he organizes semiregular Wing Nights — primal celebrations of the wing, like medieval feasts, with Miller Lite on tap.
Unlike the tidy content of the other local foodstagrams that sometimes pop up in Kurtz’s comments — @nashvillehiddengems and @nashvillehotchickenclub, to name two — Wingdom reviews resemble found literature. His erratic divergences from recognizable sentence structures and complete abandonment of the strict confines of AP Style read like the ramblings of an obsessive, drawing from an encyclopedia’s worth of reference points. Kurtz mops his brow mid-bite. “Wings” is always capitalized.
With the occasional foray into hot chicken subculture (hot chicken wings), Kurtz adds a novel local angle to the national discourse around Nashville’s signature food. For the hot Nashville wing, he recommends 400 Degrees and Slow Burn, both relatively latter-day additions to Nashville’s hot chicken scene, and both Black-owned. Each has earned top marks on multiple visits. (400 Degrees once got an 11 on Kurtz’s 10-point scale.) Fried chicken has been a flashpoint for the city’s orientation toward tourist money, not to mention the accompanying erasure of Black Nashvillians’ contributions to the city. Wingdom reviews confirm that while white restaurateurs have aggressively gobbled up market share in hot chicken, there’s a superior Black-owned wing outpost in every corner of the city.
On Kurtz’s watch, good chicken gets hype and bad chicken gets panned. Good chicken is crispy and sauced. Bad chicken is bland, soggy, dry, not crispy enough, or simply doesn’t qualify as a Wing. Particular resentment for boneless wings (“adult chicken nuggets”) and cauliflower wings (“Wyngs,” “10/10 offended,” “stop using this sacred word and kicking it around like a hackysack”) reinforce the commitments to purity and ideals that have earned Kurtz credibility with followers.
“What if, in a couple years, because of my scathing and glorifying reviews, Nashville becomes another Buffalo?” Kurtz tells the Scene. “There needs to be accountability.”
