08/01/2021
Winging it until August 15th
Wings have always been a love of mine ever since I was a kid and when I first moved to the area I found it hard to get good wings.
I started Wing Man Food Truck in October 2017 at the start of the fires and it was both extremely challenging and also very invigorating. On one hand there was so much devastation and so many losses I saw everywhere and not the best time to start a business to say the least, but the palpable resilience of the amazing people all around Sonoma County was truly an inspiration to keep going and wing it every day. It took a while but things did start to get better for the food truck. One thing that was surprising to me was how difficult it was to operate a food truck in this area. Both the Sonoma county health department and the local governments made it extremely difficult to operate within rules that seemed to be written in a way that it was almost impossible to succeed. Somehow despite that and only by driving the truck to San Francisco and Marin County to hustle enough gigs to make money I finally got to the point where I was outgrowing my commissary space and I thought maybe I'd start a second truck. Instead of buying a second truck I found this amazing spot in Cotati at 101 East Cotati Ave., and opened a restaurant instead. The space did need a lot of work and way more than I or anyone else that looked at it knew but we set out to make the place compliant for health code, ADA and any other code that was thrown at me. Several months later and heaps of cash gone we opened. We offered our signature crispy chicken wings with our house made sauces typically served on the side unless otherwise requested alongside a selection of 70 beers!!! Right from the start the response was sensational from the local community and although a handful didn't quite understand our ranch and buffalo the overwhelming majority loved it as well as our warm and welcoming staff. I was amazed how many people would come back twice in a week when we were serving such a limited menu. We eventually added a few items like our ribs which so many people said we should be called rib man too. I guess that brings is to the current situation or at least knee deep in what most of us thought could possibly be seeing the end of the current covid crisis. The ripple effects of it have touched all of us in so many ways. Most of us may know or already have read about specific items that have become scarce: toilet paper, sanitizer, disposable gloves at the beginning but now we see persistent supply issues and the most consequential for us has been chicken wings. We are now going on 8 months of a chicken wing shortage and although I tried to adjust and hope for the best and a change it has only progressively gotten worse. It wasn't just the shortage of chicken wings although is was one of our main issues, we also found many items extremely hard to find or completely unavailable including chicken breasts, cooking oil, to go containers and even more staff to handle our busier service times. Unfortunately the decision was not an easy one in fact probably one the hardest I've ever made, but given the uncertainty and everything at hand we are closing both the restaurant and the food truck. We plan to be open on our normal schedule for the restaurant Wednesday-Sunday 12-8 until Wing Man takes his flight on out last day which will be August 15th, but there is a chance we could run out of product on some of these upcoming days as well. I can't thank enough my outstanding and inspirational staff and the many awesome people that have supported us along the way, it's been a great adventure and I wish the best of luck to all.
Cheers,
Joe
Wing Man
