Wild Wing Cafe

Wild Wing Cafe is a regional casual dining restaurant and bar built around chicken wings, burgers, sandwiches and live music in a full‑service environment. The restaurants are designed as neighborhood gathering spots where guests can watch sports, listen to local bands and spend an evening out over food and drinks. As of October 2024 the chain operates roughly 30 locations across the southeastern United States, with the heaviest concentration in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and additional units in nearby states such as Tennessee, Virginia and Florida.

The concept began in 1990, when founders Cecil and Diane Crowley opened the first Wild Wing Cafe on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The original restaurant combined a large wing menu with a stage for local musicians and quickly became known as a place to meet friends and hear live music. A major turning point came in 2012, when Axum Capital Partners, a private equity firm led by former NFL player Muhsin Muhammad, acquired a controlling interest in the company. That investment shifted Wild Wing Cafe from a single‑brand regional chain into a formal growth platform within the broader sports‑bar and casual dining space.

Since that transaction, the brand has continued to focus on the Southeast while refining its footprint. Over roughly the last five years, Wild Wing Cafe has taken a measured approach to growth. The company has exited some underperforming locations, repositioned others and concentrated new openings in trade areas where its food‑and‑music model can perform throughout the week. Expansion today is driven largely by franchising, with an emphasis on contiguous growth in core states and selective entry into neighboring markets when the right local operators and real estate opportunities are available.

From a real estate standpoint, Wild Wing Cafe typically occupies end‑cap or freestanding restaurant boxes in visible suburban retail corridors. Locations are sized to support a full dining room, a prominent bar, ample TV coverage for sports and, where possible, a stage or dedicated space for live music along with patio seating. These restaurants are set up to carry traffic across multiple dayparts, functioning as lunch options for nearby employment and retail, dinner venues for families and groups and late‑night draws tied to entertainment programming.

In recent years, municipal filings and local news coverage have frequently shown Wild Wing Cafe targeting second‑generation restaurant and bar spaces. The brand often looks for former casual dining or bar concepts where kitchen systems, bar infrastructure and patio layouts are already in place. This approach shortens ramp‑up time, supports more capital‑efficient openings and allows the company and its franchisees to plug into established centers in strong retail corridors.

Within the competitive set, Wild Wing Cafe sits alongside regional sports bars and wing concepts but leans more heavily into live music and longer‑stay social visits. The combination of wings, burgers, a full bar and regular entertainment helps the restaurants generate consistent evening and weekend activity and adds an experience component that can lift the profile of a center. For landlords, brokers and developers working in the Southeast, Wild Wing Cafe presents as a mid‑sized, experience‑oriented anchor or co‑anchor that can energize food, beverage and entertainment clusters while filling larger second‑generation restaurant spaces with a familiar, established brand.