From mouthwatering sausage and pepperoni pies to blazing garlic parmesan chicken wings, New York City bars and restaurants are prepping to satisfy the thirst and appetites of hungry football fans this Sunday when the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots for the Super Bowl XLVI.
“I like the Super Bowl, it’s crazy,” said pizza maker Danny Asitimbay of Fat Sal’s Pizza on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I have no time to watch the play because it’s busy here, but I’m working hard.”
This year, specials at Fat Sal’s include a large pie and 10 wings for $21 or, for wings only fans, a bucket of 40 wings for under $26. Asitimbay, who has been working in the pizza business for the past seven years, said Fat Sal’s usually sells up to 2,000 wings on Super Bowl weekend alone. He added that the wings served at the pizzeria are “always fresh, never frozen,” and that extra ingredients had to be bought in order to prepare for the second biggest eating day of the year, following Thanksgiving.
Chicken wings take the spotlight as the most popular game-day food. According to a report from the National Chicken Council (NCC), Americans are expected to eat 1.25 billion chicken wings – 100 million pounds – this weekend.
By noon on Saturday, Atomic Wings already had 50 pre-orders for Sunday’s game.
“We regularly sell six to eight cases of wings a day,” said owner Christopher Lyn. “But for the Super Bowl, we’ll sell around 100 cases of wings – a substantial amount.”
With around 250 wings in each case, Lyn projects around 25,000 wings will be sold and devoured by consumers during the biggest wing-eating day of the year, despite a price increase on poultry. The NCC said wing prices always surge during the year’s fourth quarter, when eateries start to prepare for the Super Bowl.
Lyn added that the Giants, being from the Empire State, would impact Sunday’s sales because “we’re in a New York market.”
But while pizza and wings may be on the minds of most Americans this year, bars are also expecting a business boost. On Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg temporarily renamed Brady’s Bar in uptown Manhattan to Manning’s for the weekend, declaring it “the luckiest bar in New York City,” just as he did when the two teams battled on the gridiron in 2008.
“If I wasn’t going to be in Indianapolis, I would be spending my Sunday afternoon where I think a lot of you should spend it, and that is here at Manning’s,” Bloomberg said.
Owner Dan Brady, an avid Giants fan, said yesterday that altering the name of the bar is a fun change.
“We did it four years ago, and everybody loved it,” he said. “Everybody finds it to be a great thing. Hopefully it’ll bring the Giants good luck.”
