If your Valentine’s Day celebration involved a neon condom decorated with a talking chicken tender, you have Karen Kaffen to thank.
Kaffen, co-owner of WesWings, designed the popular giveaway after a conversation with student workers about the restaurant’s suggestive mascot: a chicken tender saying, “Eat me.”
“Someone suggested that it would be really funny to see that on a condom,” Kaffen said.
She forgot about the idea until last August, when WesWings was preparing to reopen after a long summer of remodeling.
“I thought it would be fun to open the restaurant with a new look and a little something new,” Kaffen said.
She enlisted Condom Club (http://www.condomclub.com) a Connecticut operation that has also created custom condoms for Bon Jovi concerts and the HBO series “Entourage,” to do the dirty work. For $450, the company delivered a box of 1,000 condoms, each featuring the “eat me” logo.
Kaffen reports that customers seem to love the new collector’s item.
“We’re onto our second box of one thousand, and we’re probably going to continue,” she said. “The bright colors go fast —yellow, green, orange. It also seems like they really fly out of the jar on Thursday nights.”
The condoms may even be penetrating greater Middletown, as employee Alex Mumbauer ’08 witnessed.
“I was working the register one night around 5:45, it wasn’t too busy, there was no line or anything,” Mumbauer said. “These two boys who were probably 14 came in giggling, made a beeline for the register, grabbed some handfuls of condoms and ran out again.”
Most customers, however, are less open about helping themselves.
“My favorite is the dude who comes in by himself and tries to take one without me noticing,” Mumbauer said. “I’ll see him slip a hand into the jar and then look away really quickly.”
But despite their popularity, it remains unclear how much action the condoms are really getting.
“I would be hesitant to whip one out in a romantic situation,” said Brooke Richart ’08, one of WesWings’ student managers. “I’ve heard they taste like the chicken wings, but I’ve never tested that theory.”
Likewise, Saeid Vahidi ’09 was shocked when he found out one of his friends was regularly using the condoms.
“I mean, take someone out to dinner at WesWings, sure, but use one of those?” he said.
The possibility of WesWings babies resulting from an “eat me” condom malfunction has been batted around behind the counter.
“You’d have a whole set of chicken-related names ready to go,” Mumbauer said. “I would go with Ginger.”
Kaffen emphasized that despite the goofy wrapper, the WesWings condoms are 100 percent safe and reliable.
“They’re not a novelty brand,” she said.
The condoms are not the only way that WesWings has tried to make its customers’ romantic lives easier recently. Yesterday’s Valentine’s Day menu featured a “Lady and the Tramp” dinner, with enough salad, spaghetti and brownie sundae for two to share. An “Eat Your Feelings” dinner, conceived by Mumbauer and Richart, provided a comfort—food option for solo diners, with a choice of grilled cheese or deep fried PB&J, and fries, spicy fries, or mozzarella sticks.
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