Wingstop

I went to Wingstop about three years ago, shortly after I first heard of them. I remember liking the fries, but I do not remember a single other thing about the place. Last week I was watching baseball with a friend and one of the ubiquitous-during-sporting-events Wingstop commercials with Troy Aikman came on and he asked me if I had eaten there. I said I had but that I had no recollection of the taste. So I decided to go again.
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The location I went to, in Monrovia, was tiny. The walls are covered with aviation-themed photographs and a couple TVs were tuned to an ESPN special about the NFL Draft. (I admit the NFL is 5th on my list of favorite sports - after baseball, college football, NBA basketball, and college basketball - but I really do not care one bit about the draft. I don't understand the hundreds of hours of footage ESPN produces on it, when maybe only 3 or 4 players will have any impact whatsoever for the next couple years.)

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Wingstop has wing/french fry/drink combos that are a better value than ordering separately, but I wanted to try the 7 piece boneless strips, which are not available in a combo. I selected "Cajun" and "Hawaiin" as my dipping sauces and ordered a side of honey mustard. There are several other flavors (lemon-pepper, garlic parmesan, atomic, etc.) but none that really looked good.

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The boneless strips were very good: crispy on the outside and juicy inside. Wingstop's fries are great. They are cut fresh from Idaho potatoes, fried to order and seasoned. These are what In-n-Out's fries could be.

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The sauces, unfortunately, were lousy. The Cajun sauce was buffalo sauce with a pinch of seasonings on top. The seasonings added nothing to it and it tasted exactly like buffalo sauce. The Hawaiian sauce had very little flavor. I was expecting something sweet, maybe pineapple or some other fruit, with perhaps a little spice. There was just no flavor at all. The honey mustard was good but I had to pay 69 cents extra for it. (That's not a huge amount of money, but when you're paying 3 bucks for an order of fries it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a small container of honey mustard for free.)
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I doubt I will ever return to Wingstop. If I do it will just be to get some fries. The whole meal (I also had a large ice tea in addition to what you see here) was $13.50. That's not an outrageous amount, but it's too expensive for what is basically fast food. (Just a few nights ago I picked up two footlong sandwiches and two bags of chips at Subway for dinner, and together they cost less than that.) If Wingstop's sauces had been good I would go back and try more, but they were not good at all. I have not been this let down by Troy Aikman since the 1988 USC game.