Haute-N-Ready: Buffalo Wild Wings' New Mountain Dew Sauce

Welcome to Haute-N-Ready, in which John Locanthi, Willamette Week's trencherman of leisure, tastes the hastily made, modestly priced food of the common man.

Mountain Dew is a bizarrely popular soft drink. From its humble beginnings as a carbonated vaguely citrus lime flavored corn syrup named after hillbilly moonshine, Mountain Dew has interbred into a sprawling family of assorted flavors. There's Code Red, Live Wire, Pitch Black, Game Fuel, Voltage, special flavors available only at Taco Bell (formerly a fellow division of PepsiCo), among others. These are all tied together by their caffeine content and appallingly saccharine flavor. "Sure, that's impressive and all, but when will there be a Mountain Dew-flavored sauce to coat our chicken wings with and dip fries into?" many of us have been asking. Well, our questions have been answered: Buffalo Wild Wings has partnered with Mountain Dew to give us the limited edition Zesty Citrus sauce.

Buffalo Wild Wings and Mountain Dew certainly do seem like odd bedfellows. This sauce was created as a promotion for the upcoming Buffalo Wild Wings® Citrus Bowl, which you may remember as the punchline for many of now-retired Steve Spurrier sharpest barbs directed at Peyton Manning and the University of Tennessee. But still, Mountain Dew is for young people with questionable taste, whereas Buffalo Wild Wings is for middle-aged people with low-to-middling expectations.

Regardless, I ventured forth to the downtown Buffalo Wild Wings to do the proverbial Dew.

The thing with Buffalo Wild Wings is that the food is perfectly fine—I'd even say some of the sauce options are fantastic—but the prices are all about a dollar or two higher than they should be. Presumably, this is to pay for the sports programming. Seeing as how this noon on a Monday, I did not feel I was getting my $8.99's worth for a lunch special that consisted of 6 boneless wings and some fries.

Zesty Citrus is a fantastically vague name, and the sauce fully lived up to it. In the low light, the sauce had a orangey brown look to it with red pepper seeds and other assorted spices floating about. It did indeed have the same artificial "citrus-lime" flavor that Mountain Dew prides itself on. It's a blast of fake citrus syrup on the nose that leads into mildly spicy finish. I sipped on a traditional Mountain Dew as a control, and the syrup seemed much more concentrated in the sauce. I don't much care for Mtn Dew, but this Zesty Citrus certainly tasted more like the beverage than I was expecting. My only complaint is that it wasn't a bright green.

But the real question isn't "Does the Mountain Dew sauce taste like Mountain Dew?" rather, it's "Do I want my wings to taste like Mountain Dew?"

And to answer that question, I'm not sure. The finish is nice, if still sweet, but the initial taste is as if one is biting fried chicken covered in lime-flavored ICEE syrup. These were less boneless wings than shiny, glistening candied chicken nuggets. It worked better with the chicken than the french fries. In many ways, the Zesty Citrus sauce is the perfect accompaniment to this year's Citrus Bowl between Michigan and Florida. An almost nauseating coverage in the beginning as the commentator discuss the strong efforts by Florida to get back to its championship winnings and by Michigan to get back to its Rose Bowl-losing ways, followed by a fairly boring game between two anemic offenses. Zesty Citrus is that experience in Mountain Dew-flavored sauce form.

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