"Rasclaat, bomboclaat, everyone waiting for they food!" spews the cook inside the small kitchen in the corner of the West End Trading Co. when I inquire about my order. The joint, with a joint-wielding sneakerhead chicken as its brand mascot, is appropriately called The Joint, and it's a joint venture between the folks behind Hollerbach's German Restaurant and the nearly two decades-old dive bar.
The cook, it turns out, is, well, in the weeds. He's solo in the kitchen and online orders and more from the counter kiosk keep flooding in. His reaction has me retreating back into the bar with my friends, who are pretty sedate considering we've been waiting 40 minutes for our munchies.
A pre-lunch pot stop at Cookies appears to be keeping them in a chill state of mind, so we occupy our time as best we can — playing darts in the gaming area of the bar and chuffing back some fat darts outside. Another 40 minutes goes by and we finally get our food — a total wait of an hour and 20 minutes for some wings and things.
Evidently, the ridiculously long wait is an anomaly. "I've never stood here for more than 10 minutes," says a confused regular. "There's usually two people back there," says another. An Uber Eats driver even offers to go back in the kitchen to help out but, ultimately, leaves amid a canceled order.
I feel for them, but it doesn't slow me down from digging into two sauced varieties of "cosmic" wings. The first is slicked in a finger-licking mango-habañero ($10 for eight) that does its part to smokescreen the memory of the inordinate wait time. The second, called the "Smiling Bison" ($11 for eight), evokes memories of chef (and Buffalo native) Josh Oakley, who made the Smiling Bison one of the most popular restaurants in Sanford. Naturally, the wings are shellacked in a Buffalo sauce infused with CBD. "Flavors that hit," or so says The Joint's spliff-sporting rooster, and we're feeling the flow.
There's a wackass mural of some blitzed Florida wildlife on one of the bar's walls. It held my gaze for a while and I felt myself getting tense. The bulging eye of the paranoid-looking red snapper was starting to freak me the F out, so I took to inhaling my Pineapple Express ($10), a quarter-pound hot dog sticky-ickyed with pineapple-teriyaki sauce and a mango-habañero slaw. It came with tater tots I initially dismissed as not being crispy enough, but these generously salted spud buds grew on me.
Maybe because our order of Cheech's Moonrock Nuggs ($13) — golden-fried nuggets tossed in Crazy Hector's CBD Hot Honey and Flamin' Hot Cheetos — never materialized. And I wasn't about to harsh my mellow by storming up to the counter to be like Dude, where's my nuggs? Oh hell no. Besides, we had more to eat.
Hollerbach's spicy pretzel bites ($8), tossed in a spice blend and served with cheese, weren't half-baked in the least. And Zouain's Chopped Cheese ($13), named after DJ Zouain — who doubles as The Joint's, and Hollerbach's, content producer — is a sandwich strain of the highest order: Wagyu (not Japanese) beef chopped with spicy peppers and onions and served on a brioche roll with lettuce, tomato, mayo and ketchup. It comes with onion rings, which I didn't care for at all, but that sandwich encompassed all the NYC bodega vibes.
It's clear to me why The Joint has proven popular among Sanfordites — they know how to cure the munchies right. I even paid for a Little Debbie Cosmic Brownie ($1.50) to eat later, but when I looked in the takeout bag when I got home, it was nowhere to be found. I have no clue where it went. It was there one minute, and the next — POOF! — up in smoke.
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