Rockford-area restaurant expanding to Wisconsin
A Rockford-area business that first got its start during the coronavirus pandemic is expanding into other cities.
Scott Frank and Bryan Suh, along with third partner, Marti McKinney, will open Baked Wings in January, at 250 State St. in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Madison is a college town,” Frank said. “There’s 50,000 people with an average age of 39 years old who live within a couple miles of our location. We are right between the state capitol and campus.”
Frank opened Baked Wings as a ghost kitchen in 2020 inside The Pomodoro, the Italian eatery formerly known as Ciao Bella that he and his wife bought in 2019.
“Football was about to start, and I was thinking about chicken wings,” he said. “(It was) completely different than the Italian food we’ve been serving.”
More: Baked Wings opens in Loves Park, already planning second Illinois location for 2023
Frank then had another idea.
“I thought, ‘How about we bake our wings?’” he said. “’Everybody deep fries their wings. What if we bake them as a healthier option?’”
As a ghost kitchen, Baked Wings was a delivery and curbside operation that opened while Illinois restaurants were prohibited from offering indoor dining at the height of the pandemic.
“Baked Wings was very vital in helping The Pomodoro survive COVID,” Frank said.
Frank said the chicken-wing operation was so successful, he reached out to Bryan Suh, whose family founded Mary’s Market, with the notion to open Baked Wings as a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
Suh, who was working in wholesale foods at the time, came aboard, and the pair opened the first Baked Wings at 6390 E. Riverside, Blvd., the former Eggspress location just a few hundred feet from The Pomodoro.
“We opened on Nov. 7, last year,” Frank said. “We sold 11,633 wings on Super Bowl Sunday, and that was within a 3 1/2-hour window.”
Aside from being a baked wing, Frank said what his product apart from others is how they’re seasoned.
“We learned quickly that a sauced wing, like the buffalo sauce and whatever that goes on it, doesn’t travel well,” he said. “With that, we started playing around with dry rub.”
Dry rub was the answer, Frank said.
“We’ve got 12 different dry rubs and 13 dunking sauces,” he said. “So, the skin stays crispy. It stays hot, and travels really well.”
After they get the Madison restaurant up and running, the team plans to open a third location in Daphne, Alabama, just outside Mobile.
“From that point, we have several plans to get into the franchising game,” Scott said. “We’ve already taken several steps with that with a couple different companies and a privately owned group that sought us out.”
Jim Hagerty covers business stories along with general news. Contact him at jhagerty@gannett.com
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Baked Wings in Loves Park is opening second location in Wisconsin
