Loud football noises. Louder, drunk and frustrated people. Thinking about it, this is exactly what I should have expected, going to a bar during the fourth quarter of an SEC title game as Mizzou imploded upon itself on a Saturday night. This is what I should have expected and this is what I got a SOHA (short for South Hampton) Bar & Grill on this particular visit. Aside: they appear to have no website, so I’ve linked to their Twitter account

I’ve been to this establishment four or five times, mostly during my wing review hiatus from February – November, and they’ve got a pretty good amount of things going for them. Most of the time I’m not sat next to the loudest and drunkest table.

The beer list is admirable in all the best ways that a beer list can be admirable: The prices are fair, the selection is wide, and they’ll serve you a pitcher of most anything. Also, it seems like they’ll take any excuse (4-7pm happy hour… very generous) to give you a dollar off their already reasonable draft prices.

Another cool thing about this happy hour is that it also has 1/2 price on small plates, and wings are on the small plate menu. These wings are regularly priced $9 and available in hot, mustardy hot, “dirty” hot, bbq, yaki-HO, and Thai Chili. For a $1 bonus, they’ll serve your wings unsauced with all 5 sauces on the side.

I didn’t do my due diligence and ask what yaki-HO sauce is, or even clarify what was so “dirty” about the “dirty” hot sauce. Our waitress was very friendly and helpful, but the bar was full and she clearly had a lot to deal with. Either way, I ordered the regular, non-dirty, non-mustardy hot wings as I always do for my initial review.

Based on my picture, it appears my order came with 9 wings. This is a pretty generous definition of “small plate”, and even more generous when you take into account that these 9 wings were teetering on the verge of my least favorite wing adjective: jumbo.

Jumbo wings are bad. Unbreaded and unseasoned white meat chicken has very little going for it. The fried buffalo chicken wing is wholly redeemed by the fact that its fried and covered in sauce. The larger the chicken wing, the more you have to pay attention to the chicken. If a wing is smoked, or made more interesting in some other way, it is possible to redeem a jumbo wing but it’s always an uphill battle.

So, these wings are too big. They were also not very crispy. The sauce was pretty middle-of-the-road in the hotness and flavor department, and as such the wings were fine. There was plenty of sauce coating the wings, though there wasn’t much left over at the bottom of the basket at the end.

I’m curious about the other sauces here, and if I were to order wings again here I’d probably go with the 5-sauce option to see what’s what. As it is, these wings are probably a pass on a menu that has a lot of other interesting items.