Hot Pizza & Cold Beer: name a more iconic duo. While cold beer is certainly a perfect sidekick for hot pizza, I might argue that buffalo wings pair just as well with pizza, and that beer + pizza + wings is unstoppable… if the wings & pizza are good. If the beer isn’t good, something has gone very wrong. That’s a tough one to mess up.

But often times pizza places have very bad wings. The big pizza chains are trying, constantly reinventing their wing offerings to try to make them not suck, but most of the time they suck. It is more difficult to make decent wings than edible pizza. A place that has both great pizza and great wings is a rare treat!

All this to say: I was amped to hear about Hot Pizza Cold Beer, a new concept from Mike Johnson, a man who’s responsible for some of my favorite non-wing spots in St. Louis: Hi-Pointe Drive In, Sugarfire, Chicken Out & others. And I was even more amped to see a healthy selection of wing choices on the menu.

Seven flavors! Yum. The $12 price is for 6 wings. 12 are $24. So no discount for ordering more, which is fine I supposed.

We had a babysitter on Saturday and we hit up Hot Pizza Cold Beer! (This would be a good place to take children, if your children like pizza and don’t mind a somewhat burdensome parking experience. But taking young kids to a place you’ve never been before is always a bit of a gamble.) Located downtown on the Mike Johnson Block of Washington Ave (Sugarfire across the street, Hi Pointe in the same building), HPCB has done their best to make a fun restaurant out of a space with no personality at all. There’s a lot of pizza pop culture on the walls and a big St. Louis flag. Whatever, it works.

Our server Amanda was delightful. We ordered 6 buffalo wings and 6 Thai Sweet Chili wings. The buffalo isn’t the flavor that was the most exciting to me, but I feel like I have an obligation to try it everywhere I go. Lydia was excited about the Thai Sweet Chili. We both ordered ours with blue cheese and they both came with ranch, but this was quickly rectified and we got both dipping sauces as a result of this minor snafu. Let’s call it a win.

Both wings were fantastic! I am an outspoken advocate for smaller wings because I think that most of the time the sauce & the skin are the interesting part of the wing, but these were sizable and the chicken itself was delicious. They call them “crispy fried” but I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent some time in the Sugarfire smokers across the street before meeting the deep frier.

Both were adequately sauced, and the sauce provided a nice compliment to the delicious chicken without overpowering it. The textures were great and every wing was well cooked. I was worried the Sweet Thai Chili wings would be too sweet… they weren’t! It was a very balanced sauce. And the Buffalo was a quality rendition of a tried & true classic.

Even though I really enjoyed both flavors, were I to come here again, I’d try two different ones! Probably the Nashville hot and the Parmesan garlic would be my next order, but I’m curious about all of them. In an overall enjoyable meal (we got a build-your-own-pizza with bacon & onion), the wings were our favorite part.