Never mess with a Buffalonian’s chicken wings. To avoid any serious flaps, just fry them to a high crisp, axe out those gourmet sauce ingredients, and for God’s sake save the Ranch dressing for getting undesirable raw vegetables down your throat.

If I hadn’t been born, buttered and sauced in Buffalo, N.Y., where chicken wings are as omnipresent as snow shovels and thermal underwear, I might better embrace the more pliant versions slathered in mango chutney or maple glaze. In fact, you need only step outside of metro Buffalo by a few miles to start encountering such sacrilege. I’ll admit that I’ve savored some newfangled variations, but they always seem to involve wings that are pulled from their fryers prematurely.

After reading that the national franchise, Wingstop, participated in the Buffalo Chicken Wing Festival three years in a row, I headed straight to its Loma Portal location for the acid test. (There are Wingstops in Lemon Grove and Chula Vista as well.) In tow was a fellow wing dinger who became an affiçionado of classic Buffalo wings after I dragged him through my hometown, often out of the cold, and into joints where the balmy aroma of Frank’s Hot Sauce and butter hits you at the door. Here, that familiar smell whispers in your ear while poring over eight additional flavor choices that everyday Buffalo folk would find baffling.

Buried within the list is “original hot” – the attempted recipe for traditional Buffalo-style sauce. The butter (or margarine) that customarily goes into the sauce was scant, not quite enough to fully smooth out its peppery, vinegary properties. In Buffalo, you’re given a choice of mild, medium or hot, achieved by tweaking the ratio of butter to hot sauce. Here, no adjustments are offered.

Placing our order at the counter for a “double wing pack,” which includes 20 wings and 10 boneless chicken strips (with up to two different flavors for each), plus fries, a side dish and three “specialty dips,” we learned that the wings are deep fried for 14 minutes – about four minutes below the Buffalo standard. So we requested them extra crispy, and much to our dismay we received the order in nine minutes.

It came as no surprise that their skins weren’t marvelously crispy like potato chips. But nor were they outright rubbery, if only because the appendages lacked in size, originating probably from cute little runts whose feet never left the ground for a nanosecond. Though compared to 99.9 percent of plumper wings served outside of Buffalo, and when cooked invariably for this same amount of time or less, they tickled our feathers just enough to bestow partial honors.

We also sampled three other “flavors” split between the remaining half of our wings and the boneless chicken strips in the meal. The “atomic” sauce was painfully hot merely for the sake of being hot, sans any flavor dimension. Garlic-parmesan “is what it is.” And a lemon-pepper coating tasted suspiciously like pre-mixed, commercial seasoning, with the lemon essence gone stale from age.

When asking an employee about the specs of various wing sauces and “specialty dips,” (Ranch, honey-mustard, chunky and weak blue cheese), he guardedly withheld information about their ingredients and distributors.

“This isn’t such great stuff that they need to keep it top secret,” my companion commented afterwards. I confoundedly agreed.

In addition to other wing flavors (Cajun, teriyaki, Hawaiian, hickory barbecue, etc.), the menu features side dishes such as potato salad, coleslaw and bourbon baked beans, which give you a discernable taste of the booze upfront. As for the wings and strips, they can be ordered in various combinations, quantities and meal packages.

Wingstop’s prefabricated atmosphere features corrugated metal wainscoting, framed aeronautical sketches and wooden chairs parked at about 10 tables, all draped in dark-green rubber tablecloths. Service is factory-line efficient, fueled largely by young impassioned employees tied to a corporate manual of deep frying.

The company is based out of Texas with numerous locations spread throughout the country, except for Buffalo – a telling clue that these wings might not stay airborne in the city that made the dish so popular.