I want to expand a bit on what we reported last week in our Whispers column about Wing It Forward’s plans for Little Rock, with an emphasis on the idea behind the restaurant and the meaning behind the name.
For those who missed it, Chris Maynes, president of the Whole Hog Cafe chain, based in Little Rock, told us that a Wing It Forward chicken wings restaurant was planned for the space next door to the Whole Hog at 2516 Cantrell Road, in the space formerly occupied by Tuesday Morning.
Whole Hog is also building a kitchen suitable for approval by the U.S. Department of Agriculture so it can start fulfilling online orders for more products, like its ribs, and ship them across the country.
Maynes is the brother of Kathy Blasingame, widow of Ron Blasingame, who founded Whole Hog in 2000 with Mike “Sarge” Davis and Steve Lucchi. When Ron Blasingame died in 2009, Maynes, a New Jersey native then working in Philadelphia, came aboard the Whole Hog team as “the business guy.”
Maynes had relevant experience. After graduating from college, he served six years in the Navy, managing food service on two different ships. He then went to graduate school and moved into corporate finance, working for Aramark, which provides food and facilities services to hospitals, universities and other businesses around the world, and for a large cable company.
Maynes said, “The really nice thing about switching to barbecue, when you work for the cable company, and you tell people that at a party or something, they’re like, ‘Let me tell you about how long I was on hold last week when my cable went out.’ So when you work for Whole Hog, people are like, ‘Oh, I love Whole Hog!’ It’s a whole different experience.”
The idea behind Wing It Forward was born in 2013, at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, Maynes said, when the Whole Hog team won first place in the chicken wings competition. That got them thinking about putting wings on the menu.
But the winning wings had first been smoked, then fried, and to duplicate the wings the restaurant would need fryers, equipment that most Whole Hog restaurants didn’t have. They sat on the idea for a while, until they got a fryer at the Whole Hog in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and began offering the wings, which later became an item at the Whole Hog in west Little Rock. Now the team began contemplating a restaurant devoted to wings “because wings are such a big thing.”
Maynes said he is a fan of the Tacos 4 Life concept of contributing a portion of the purchase price of every meal to the organization Feed My Starving Children. “That’s a really great organization,” he said. For every 10 wings Wing It Forward sells, it donates a meal to Feed My Starving Children.
And so when in 2019 Whole Hog established the wings restaurant brand, the name Wing It Forward emerged, as a takeoff on the concept of “pay it forward.”
Three years ago, when the restaurant was relocating in Medford, New Jersey, the team “co-branded the space” as a dual Whole Hog Cafe/Wing It Forward restaurant.
When Tuesday Morning left its Riverdale location, the space became available to try a Wing It Forward in Little Rock and build a USDA kitchen.
Wing It Forward features wings, naturally, in a variety of flavors and a variety of sauces, and Maynes said the team is also considering offering breakfast at some point with a menu including chicken tenders and waffles.
As we noted last week, Maynes hopes the Wing It Forward will be open sometime later this fall.
Bosley Construction of Benton is the contractor on the project.
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