The Bad Company wings are a nightly ritual at Old 96 bar in Cleveland's Gordon Square neighborhood.has spent exactly a year providing a third space for locals to enjoy domestic beers and loud rock and roll music in Cleveland’s Gordon Square neighborhood.
That’s how Bad Company Wings was born at the end of 2023. Between 10 and 11 p.m. every night, except for Tuesdays and Wednesdays when Good Company is currently closed, a few orders are available for patrons. The Good Company kitchen staff breads and fries a few orders of the restaurant’s classic 72-hour brined wings before dunking them in a signature hot maple sauce only available at the bar. When the restaurant shift ends , the crew hand delivers the snacks to a crowd of tipsy patrons.
“It’s never going to be anything that we make a bunch of money off of,” Hollingsworth said. “I just wanted it to be a cool little secret thing about this place that sometime between 10 and 11 p.m., a big box of special chicken wings that you can only get here shows up.”DineDrinkCLE talks Oat Haus relocation to Cleveland, Ficarra Cellars, Ohio distillery trailThe simple secret of the wings is a metaphor for Old 86 as a business.
“You can go to a place where you pretend, for a while, that everything is standing still,” Hollingsworth said. “Because of that, it’s really important to me that this place was the same every night.”Bar 86 opened the same week that Hollingsworth closed the Spotted Owl cocktail bar. It’s not a coincidence that Old 86 doesn’t have a robust drink menu. It’s proudly not a cocktail bar.
The owners at Old 86 avoid gimmicks. It’s not the kind of bar with tons of events or activity nights to keep customers engaged.