Pete Naughton, an ex-Marine who says he spent years hunting for the perfect Buffalo wing, is now putting all that research to work at Big Sauce, a takeout-focused Old Town spot that sells nothing but wings and a single potato side. His playbook leans hard on ultra-crispy jumbo wings and a house signature sauce he calls a Chicago-style mild, and locals are already treating the little storefront as a go-to late-night pit stop for carryout wings.
Big Sauce runs as a pickup-and-delivery window at 831 N Sedgwick in Old Town, with a website that lists a 30-minute prep time, limited evening hours, and a clear preference for text orders. The menu is deliberately tight, treating wings as the headliner instead of a bar menu afterthought. According to Big Sauce, there is no dine-in service.
Crisp, Tallow-Fried Wings
Naughton says he dialed in the details of his ideal wing through months of testing, including trips to Buffalo, eventually landing on jumbo wings that are flash-fried to a hard crunch, then tossed in a house sauce he describes as a Chicago mild. Big Sauce’s wings are fried in beef tallow and paired with “big potatoes,” crunchy potato shards meant for dunking in house ranch, as reported by NBC Chicago. His process, he told the outlet, involved tinkering with flour ratios, cook times, and resting periods so that the wings stay crisp all the way through delivery.
From Cloud Kitchen To Old Town Storefront
Naughton first launched Big Sauce as a cloud-kitchen operation and told Axios Chicago that he sampled dozens of wing shops before debuting the concept in 2021. He has said the project was deliberately methodical, from testing sauces to working out scaling techniques and figuring out how to make wings that travel well, a strategy that shows up in the stripped-down menu. That focus helped Big Sauce build a following even before the Old Town window opened…