Heavenly Buffaloes (Vegan)
407 W Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC 27516
Sauce: Sweet Thai Coconut Chili | Size: 13 | Price: $20.99 Meat Quality: 4/5 | Finish: 3.5/5 | Size: 4/5 | Uniqueness: 4/5 | Flavor: 4/5
In addition to this being the first review for Kevin Eats Wings on Substack, this is also my first revisit to a restaurant to get their vegan option! My previous review of Heavenly Buffaloes was to their Durham, NC location where I had their traditional chicken wings. For this review, I made a trip out to Chapel Hill for these delicious and unique vegan wings.
One thing I was excited about back in 2021 when I moved to North Carolina was the opportunity to have more meat-alternative wings, and I really haven’t done a great job of highlighting those on this blog. THAT CHANGES TODAY.
When you search “vegan wings durham nc” basically the only result you get is Heavenly Buffaloes, so this seems like an appropriate first review to have of faux-formerly-feathered fare. I enlisted the assistance of a friendly neighborhood vegan, Sean, for this review and we both definitely enjoyed them. The non-vegan HB wings received an overall wing score of 96.5, and these little disks of deliciousness received a 93.25. Much of that difference comes purely from the size metric since Heavenly Buffaloes has some rather large bone-in wings.
The vegan meat alternative that Heavenly Buffaloes uses is listed as a “Local NC soy protein” which appears to be some form of texturized vegetable protein (TVP) / textured soy protein (TSP). These aren’t your grandma’s cauliflower or tofu wings! They’ve got a texture and a chew to them that is really satisfying.
As with their traditional bone-in and boneless wings, you can get whatever sauce you want with their vegan wings, but you should be warned that HB’s buffalo sauce is NOT vegan and you might need to check with an employee on your options if you’re trying to maintain a strictly vegan diet. I’d definitely recommend the Sweet Thai Coconut Chili sauce since it was delightful, light, and sweet.
