In the end, they wouldn’t let me into the “Welfare Room” at the chicken-wing festival in Sheffield. I do not know what kind of episode one would need to be experiencing to warrant admission – a medical incident? Ego death? But I can tell you this: “I just want to have a look!” is not sufficient.
It is Sunday afternoon, it is raining, and I am in a warehouse in South Yorkshire arguing about this with the attendant at Wing Fest – a kind of travelling circus of chicken-wing vendors, their loyal groupies and a tranche of more fair-weather fans. Every year, these traders descend on London, Sheffield, Derby, Bristol and Manchester to flog deep-fried poultry to irony-immune millennials.
The perimeter of the room (which might be the darkest place in the cosmos) is lined with stalls, each named something worse than the last: Chicken Ting, Dirty Chicken, Hello Oriental. The Sam Fearon Wing Fest House Band plays “Wagon Wheel” (but of course). I hear tales of how it got rowdy last night – all that Korean barbecue sauce and all that beer can have their effects, you know. By my conservative calculation, 15,000 chickens had to die for this three-day bonanza.
The chicken wing lends itself to a festival format – they are small, cheap, and you can eat a lot before getting full. A beef Bourguignon festival would fall at the conceptual hurdle for the inverse reasons. We are here to worship a bar snack. I just met someone who was polishing off his 18th wing: not as good as the 17th but better than the 16th, he tells me. The instinct to rank and reward permeates the Wing Fest Mentality – this is a way to gamify an otherwise soulless lunch. Dirty Chicken advertises a recent accolade, front and centre on its stall: Derby region, second place, in the “Wild Wing People’s Choice” category, 2023. It’s not exactly an Oscar.
There are very few women here. Men in the north used to race pigeons and play rugby league on the weekends. Now they Wing Fest instead. A few small children are dragged around, bewildered by what their fathers do in their spare time. Thorstein Veblen once condemned the “leisure class” and I think he may have had a point.
I look around. I find a man in a T-shirt that may have fit him once, before he discovered a midlife passion for chicken wings. He is covered in sauce, like a baby in a high chair often is. Everyone around him is wearing matching, branded Wing Fest hats. There is table football, air hockey and “axe throwing” (it’s exactly what it sounds like); they are drinking Beavertown lager and they are about to vote on the best wing. I cannot help but think it all seems rather old fashioned. I head outside into a concreted prison yard. The walls are high – lest you try to escape. The rhythmic thud of axes hitting wood adds to the soundscape. I picture chickens lining up to be de-winged by the sharp implement. Thud. Thud. Thud. God willing, one might hit me.
I turn to four friends who have driven up from Nottingham. They come every year and recommend I try the “Gorgonzola wing”. Well, time to contact the When-in-Rome Department in my soul and start eating. It was nice. Everything else I tried blended into a vaguely pan-Asian singularity: vinegary, sharp, briney, bony. Because they are so small, the wing is unusually vulnerable to tiny thermodynamic fluctuations – which is to say, they were also cold.
I continue to trawl through the prison yard – now the band is playing “Wonderwall”, which is itself the disposable, heavily plucked wing of the Oasis back catalogue – and I am wondering what strange process of cultural Chinese whispers has led me here. The very concept of a food festival, the “wing” terminology, the trucker hats, the exposed-brick-of-it-all are supposed to be an East Coast urban American inheritance, arriving in the post-industrial English north 20 years too late. But this is, at best, a simulacrum of a simulacrum – or what happens when you take a cultural movement, divorce it from time, place and founding motivation, and turn it into an excuse for directionless gluttony. This should be enough to grant me access to the Welfare Room.
[Further reading: Wine and mussels in Reform’s boozy heartland]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, No More Kings