The 7 Worst Fast Food Chicken Wings Of All Time, Based On Reviews

Almost everything about chicken wings is tainted with deception. Even chickens probably get annoyed about chicken wings because it's not like they're real wings or anything. How many chickens have you personally observed soaring through the clouds, skirting mountain tops, and slipping the surly bonds of Earth? Any? Chickens can't use those things to fly, so are they actually wings? Also, are boneless wings actually wings? No, they're not. They're basically glorified chicken nuggets. When done right, though, even a glorified chicken nugget can be delicious and satisfying.

Sadly, "right" is an elusive concept when it comes to fast food chicken wings. Pizza places — which have inexplicably almost universally jumped on the "we should sell wings" bandwagon — are also the least likely to sell wings people actually like. To be fair, though, customers are pretty equal-opportunity haters when it comes to fast food chicken wings. Even KFC, which is a literal chicken place, and Wingstop, which is a literal chicken wings place, can't seem to get them right all of the time, maybe even most of the time.

So when you're craving chicken wings, should you gamble on a potentially slimy, undersized, overbreaded fast food wing or just make your wings at home? That's up to you. But based on the culinary history of fast food chicken wings, the only thing consistent about them is how inconsistently bad they are. Here's what customers (with a dash of personal opinion) are calling the worst fast food chicken wings of all time. 

Fried food begins to degrade almost immediately after it comes out of the fryer. Coat it in sticky sauce, and the breading sucks up moisture like a stale bread roll someone tossed in a kiddie pool. So why the geniuses at various fast food pizza places all over America decided that restaurants with food delivery as a part of their business model should add a menu item that will naturally transform itself from a crispy delight into a soggy disgusting mess in 10 minutes or less is almost beyond comprehension, but here we are.

There's really not a lot Little Caesars or any other pizza restaurant can do to preserve the integrity of the chicken wings en route to the customer because (surprise!) when you put something hot and breaded into a box, steam collects inside and seeps into the breading, magically transforming it from delicious to practically inedible, or, as one Redditor put it, "flabby little blobs of mush."

Other complaints about Little Caesars wings in particular focus on size (tiny) and price (more than a buck per wing), but customers also have a range of complaints about what they taste like, with some finding them too salty and others saying they just have a weird, fake kind of flavor that borders on slightly sour. Wait, sour? Um, no. Sour is not a flavor that belongs anywhere near chicken wings.

In yet another stellar example of a poor business decision, Domino's decided to add wings to its menu way back in 1994, and for some reason the things are still on the menu today despite being almost universally despised by customers. In fact, Domino's delivers six different varieties of terrible wings to your door, but hey, at least you're not stuck hating only one flavor.

So, any redeeming qualities? Well, some customers do like the sauces that come with Domino's wings. The mango habanero sauce is apparently "pretty good," according to one Reddit post, and another actually called it "decent." Unfortunately, the sauce alone isn't enough to cancel out other complaints, which include the standard range of grievances about pizza joint wings like "soggy," "bland," and "tiny." To be fair, one Redditor did say that Domino's wings were "edible," and that's pretty high praise for pizza joint wings by most standards. Another person on that same Reddit post, though, made the notable comment, "I can honestly say I would rather have nothing than eat this again," which feels a bit weightier than "edible." The best advice we can offer for Domino's wings — or any other pizza joint wings, really — is this: Pizza joints do pizza. Just get pizza.

Fast food you eat at the restaurant almost never looks as good as it does on the menu. For a delivery item, you have to lower your expectations even more because no pizza place is going to have their photographer order food on the app and then take pictures of it after it arrives at their house 45 minutes later. Truth in advertising, it seems, can be bent a little when it comes to photography.

More than one Redditor has complained about Papa Johns and the absolute fiction of its advertising photos. The picture shows plump, delightfully saucy wings, and opening the box reveals chicken nuggets hastily streaked with bottled whatever-that-is.

The lack of eye appeal isn't the only problem with Papa Johns wings. When a menu item's highest praise is from a Redditor who says, "I work for Papa Johns and the only reason I eat our wings is because I can get em for free," perhaps you should pause and reevaluate before you decide to pick up a box of these things to eat. When most people describe the wings, they use words like "garbage," "trash," and various other synonyms for the stuff the big green truck picks up from your curb on Monday mornings. Other specific qualities about Papa Johns wings that seem to put people off include the soggy texture, the diminutive size, and the fact that they taste like frozen dino nuggets, only somehow worse.

No one truly believes Taco Bell is a Mexican restaurant — except Yelp, which for some reason likes to include it in every "Mexican food" search result for any city in America, but let's just let that go for now. Taco Bell isn't a Mexican restaurant, but it does at least serve food that's Mexican-ish — you know, taco-shaped items, things that are vaguely burrito-esque, and french fries with nacho cheese sauce. Taco Bell doesn't usually stray super far from that mold, so the fact that it has had wings on its menu more than one time is a bit strange, especially given that no one actually seems to like them.

Taco Bell last introduced this travesty of a menu item in 2023 as a part of its "Game Day Box," apparently in the hope that people hosting Super Bowl parties would be inspired to put the least possible amount of effort into the food and/or to have the least popular Super Bowl party snacks of all time. 

Taco Bell did make its wings pseudo "Mexican-ish" by coating them in "Mexican Queso seasoning," so extra points for effort. But for some inexplicable reason, it decided to charge $8 for five wings and serve them a box that could easily hold 10 or 15 wings. This bizarre decision probably contributed to how ripped off people felt when they opened the box to behold the diminutive things sitting in one corner in a puddle of orange grease.  

KFC is a fried chicken chain, just so we're clear. It has been serving chicken since 1952, so what the heck, KFC? Why are wings so much harder to get right than everything else on your menu?

Wings are a bit of a problem for chicken restaurants because most people who order a bucket of chicken would rather have the meatier pieces. They feel a bit ripped off when their eight-piece bucket includes wings. Although KFC doesn't exactly publish numbers when it comes to how many people ask for wingless buckets, it's probably safe to say that rebranding wings is a good way to make sure they sell. Hence the KFC "Hot & Spicy Wings."

Unfortunately, a lot of customers seem to be disappointed by KFC's Hot & Spicy Wings, especially the most recent incarnation. A Facebook reviewer in Tulsa complained that "the skin was like oily rubber. And most of it wasn't connected to the chicken."  A Redditor posted a photo in which the sauce packet actually seems to be roughly the same size as a wing. Another Redditor said "omg the wings ... how can they even legally call those wings?" One comment even compared them to horsemeat. Eeeek. 

Ghost peppers have a heat rating of about 1,041,427 Scoville heat units (SHU). To give you a reference point, a habanero pepper is around 100,000-350,000 SHU, and the humble jalapeño is a pathetic 2,000-8,000 SHU. So here's a tip: If you're going to have a menu item called "Darin' Dab Ghost Wings," it needs to be ridiculously, overwhelmingly "I'm about to die" spicy, otherwise you're abusing the word "ghost." Seriously. Call it "habanero" or "jalapeño" instead. People are still gonna eat it. Maybe even more people will eat it because although some people are keen to eat very spicy things, it's probably a safe guess that at least as many people are going to be like, "No thanks, I don't want to feel like my mouth is full of sulfuric acid."

Popeyes (another chicken restaurant), serves ghost pepper wings that customers say aren't spicy. One Redditor even said, "They might as well be plain," which is not a glowing recommendation for something named "Darin' Dab Ghost Wings."  This particular menu item appears to have undergone a change from a time when it was actually spicy, so perhaps Popeyes was hoping to appeal to both spice-loving and spice-hating customers with this one menu item, which is frankly impossible and ridiculous.

The ghost pepper wings aren't the only wings that customers dislike. A few reviewers online also complain about the wings in general as dry, salty, and even gritty, none of which are qualities you want in something you eat.

Wingstop, as the name implies, is a wing restaurant. When you have "wing" in your name, there really isn't any excuse for serving bad wings. Ever.

So why have Wingstop's wings gotten a bad reputation with a lot of customers? The top reason seems to be consistency, with customers saying the wings are good ... sometimes. But when your whole brand is wings and you can't get your wings right all the time, you deserve a mention in any discussion about bad fast food wings.

Wingstop's classic bone-in wings seem to have the worst reputation, with customers complaining that they are often too dry. Other customers hate on the sauces and the chicken, like the Redditor who said, "The chicken literally tasted like newspaper, that's how bland it was. And while the Korean bbq sauce was fine (just fine, not great) the Atomic sauce WAS CRIMINAL. It wasn't all that spicy, but it tasted like POISON." Ew, no, you definitely don't want people saying your food tastes like poison. That's not good PR.

"Worst" is just as subjective as "best." For every person who hates a thing, there's another person who thinks it's the best thing ever. And with something like fast food, the location, time from fryer to plate, and the specific location's policies are all variables that can have a big impact on the quality of the product. So if you're scratching your head over why your favorite fast food chicken wing is on this list, it's possible that you're lucky enough to live near a location that prides itself (more than what's typical) on making sure you get great wings. Or, you may have ordered your wings in the restaurant and eaten them before they had a chance to turn soggy and awful.

For this list, then, we picked the wings that tallied the most obviously disappointed reviews from places like Reddit and Facebook (because if you're mad enough to post about it on social media, it's probably very bad indeed). Personal experience also played a role, but in general, the more people who were loud about their hatred, the more likely the product was to end up on our list. That doesn't mean all these wings are always bad all the time, but in the aggregate, the haters get to hate.