National Wings Day: Celebrating Fifty Years of a Favourite Pub Snack at W.E.’s fifth annual Wing Fest

August 6, 2026 · 0 Comments

Restauranteur Robert Stewart knows his wings.

The popular proprietor of Wicked Eats in north Aurora has been in the restaurant business for more than fifty years and the commencement of his career coincided with the arrival of chicken wings on the menus of Toronto pubs.

“I’ve lived through the beginnings of wings in the GTA. Kelsey’s popularized wings back in 1977 at the same time as Pete and Marty’s brought the concept of the chicken wing as pub fare to Toronto. I met Marty in 1981 after he left Kelsey’s to open his upscale restaurants. I stayed with them for 18 years and saw the rise in the food’s popularity.

“I’ve worked with all the Wing restaurants over the years—Wild Wing, Buffalo Wings, and St. Louis Bar and Grill. When I worked at St. Louis, I created and introduced the Wingsanity promotion. It was this range of experiences that inspired the menu for Wicked Eats.”

However, Stewart’s connection to chicken wings goes much deeper than his days helping to establish restaurant chains over parts of six decades.

His links to the tender morsels are steeped in family history: “Chicken wings helped raise a family—Vincent Baldasio was my mother’s father, but the inspirational leader was my grandmother who was confined to a wheelchair. She was the matriarch of the Baldasio family whose roots were in Cacerta, Italy. Living in Cabbagetown, she earned a reputation as a strong woman who was very resourceful. She would get the inexpensive pieces of chicken from the butcher that other people considered to be scraps and salvaged the wings and the pope’s nose. She’d season the chicken, serve it in her homemade sauces that we use at Wicked Eats, and wings and the pope’s nose would be a main part of our dinners to help make ends meet. They were the least expensive parts of the chicken and were tied to my Italian roots in Toronto. The pope’s nose was my favourite—it was so tender—until my grandfather told me the part of the chicken that the pope’s nose came from.”

Stewart laughs when he shares that childhood epiphany about a chicken’s anatomy.

Consequently, the pope’s nose is not featured in any of his signature dishes, but wings have been a staple of the Wicked Eats menu.

“We introduced Wing Fest in 2021 with 57-cent wings. This year, on our fifth anniversary of WingFest, we gave out free five-wing sample packs to the first fifty people who dropped by on July 29 on National Wing Day. Our ‘All-You-Can-Eat for $24.99’ wings promotion ran for the entire month of July.”

The long-time restauranteur reflects with much gratitude about the past and expressed some reservations about the health of the industry in the present.

“I grew up in the Golden Age of restaurants, but the restaurant business had been a grind for the last five years. It hasn’t been a lot of fun – so a bigger WingFest event in Town featuring the independent restaurants would bring some of the fun back to restaurant life. By the way, our record for eating chicken wings at a sitting at Wicked Eats is 48. Those contests make for fun gatherings.”

I was enticed to vie for the record, and settled into the All-You-Can Eat promotion which started with a delectable 10-pack of wings, the pub’s fresh-cut fries, and it was complemented with an ice-cold Strongbow Cider.

I enjoyed two subsequent five packs and called it a day with the essence of Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce still dancing in my salivary glands. It was a great way to celebrate Wing Fest and to partake in National Wing Day.

If the Wicked Eats proprietor has his way, a WingFest will eventually be celebrated across Aurora to rival the much-loved RibFest. Stewart praised five of the many independent restaurants in Town who could host a lively crosstown WingFest—Tina’s Grill, St. Louis, TJ’s, PD Diner, and The Tipsy Goose—and lauded the quality of their fare and the quality of wings.

The veteran restauranteur opined in our booth by the bar that “this should be celebrated by Aurorans. On this anniversary, the story of the chicken wing needs to be told.”

By Jim Stewart