Good Dog Bar

Good Dog Bar
224 South 15th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
(215) 985-9600

An awesome bar/restaurant located at 224 South 15 th Street, Good Dog spans three floors, has a spectacular draught list, and a food menu that is out of this world. Their Good Dog burger and fries are a contender for the best in the city, to say the least. Each of us Wing Questers have been to Good Dog multiple times, and each of us were already familiar with the quality of their food and drink, except for their wings. Needless to say, our hopes were high and we were more than willing to go down to Good Dog and do our next Quest there.


One thing about Good Dog is that it is usually pretty packed, and while it does have three floors, the building itself is slim, and only two of the floors are dedicated to dining. So waiting at least a half hour to get a table is an almost unavoidable part of the Good Dog experience. We didn’t really mind waiting all that much though as the third floor has a pool table which Nick and myself took full advantage of. When our table was ready, we sat down and ordered.


First things first, Good Dog only offers one kind of wing, the “Wings” wing. Yes, neither Hot nor BBQ, nor any other sort of indicator as to what you’re in store for when you order; just “Wings”. The wings are boasted as being “jumbo” and for the price tag of $11(!) for ten(!?!?), we gave Good Dog the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the wings would be really big. And when the wings finally did come out, celery and bleu cheese in tote, we took note of their size. On average, Good Dog’s jumbo wings are definitely larger than your average wing, but not by any crazy amount and I personally had the displeasure of having at least two wings in my order that were completely average sized and utterly unimpressive. But to be fair, the wings are really meaty and that's definitely a plus.


The wings come “smothered in Good Dog’s very own wing sauce” which is probably the weirdest sauce we’ve ever had to review. The vague nature of the wings just being called “wings” was made clear to us after the first bite. The sauce has a flavor that just can’t really be placed. The Good Dog “Wings” experience is as follows: first, a sort of sweet BBQ pummeled with tomato sauce, then a smoky, almost chipotle flavor, and finished off with a wee lil kick of heat. It wasn't an unpleasant experience, but none of us could really get into the sauce. It was almost like the sauce just didn’t know what it wanted to be, and the chef’s indecisiveness in crafting this sauce really bogged the wings down. But the light at the end of the tunnel, as there always is one, was the bleu cheese and celery. The bleu cheese had a thick, almost whipped, consistency and tasted super fresh which made for great dipping with the chunks of celery.

"Wings"

One thing we discussed last night after we had finished our meal was how bars and restaurants that have amazing food, always seem to treat wings as an afterthought, like “Eh, who gives a shit? They’re just wings.” Nick recently ran into this in his Quick Quest for Plush; great food otherwise, shitty wings. Our Good Dog experience was the same way, only it was made worse by the fact that these wings come at such a hefty price. And it makes me really angry that I had a couple wings that weren’t jumbo at all, but I still paid $1.10 for each wing. So with wings that are generally above average in size, a forgettable, amorphous sauce, and a ludicrous price tag attached to the whole thing, all of us here at Wing Quest would recommend getting anything else but the wings because Good Dog really does have some of the best food in the city otherwise.

Wing: 6.83
Sauce: 5.16
Price: 1.3


Overall: 4.4


Review by Tom Kaericher