Burning Question: What are the most popular Super Bowl party foods?

It’s hard to know just which Americans love more, the Super Bowl, the commercials or the numbers related to the big game.

The figures are staggering. To run 30 seconds of Budweiser Clydesdale footage costs around $5.25 million. Americans will chug some 50 million cases of beer on Super Sunday. And if trends hold true, well over 100 million people will tune in—or log on—to watch the Chiefs and Saints butt heads.

Wait...The refs did what?! We have to put up with the friggin’ Patriots again?

Ah, hell.

Well, there is some consolation. With Super Sunday now ranked as one of the largest days of unrepentant gluttony in the calendar year (second only to another football-related holiday, Thanksgiving) there should be plenty of distractions between commercial breaks.

Again, the numbers are weighty. One recent report from the Calorie Control Council pegged nationwide Super Sunday intake at 30 million total pounds, with individuals inhaling a minimum of 1,200 calories and 50 grams of fat. And those estimates reflect just the stuff considered snack food.

“It’s pretty amazing,” observes Brian Hein, food and beverage manager for the Portola Hotel, home to Peter B’s Brewpub and Jacks Monterey. “The whole game you’re snacking.”

Clearly there’s not much control there. Sorry Calorie Control Council, but Sunday is the Super Bowl of party spreads.

“People expect a lot chips and dips—things to dip in, whether it’s pita bread or tortilla chips,” explains Steve Mayer, a manager at Big Sur Taphouse. Finger foods and chicken wings—almost what you’d expect to get in a stadium, that stadium atmosphere.”

Chickens sacrifice something like 1.25 billion—yes, that’s with a ‘b’—wings for the game, at least according to the National Chicken Council.

Yeah, there’s a National Chicken Council, too. And they clearly don't do much to help the birds.

“It’s our busiest day,” says Nick Soria, manager at Buffalo Wild Wings in Seaside. “I would say we probably sell three times as many wings as on a normal day.”

No surprise. Some estimates claim that close to 50 million people schedule takeout or delivery, and not just of wings. A National Restaurant Association survey found that 61 percent of Americans believe pizza is a must for the game.

“Chicken wings and pizza—those will be off the charts,” Hein says.

Fortunately, those items are a staple on the menu at Peter B’s. All the restaurant does to prep is keep their usual happy hour times—which doesn’t seem like much preparation at all.

At Big Sur Taphouse the plan is to offer the regular menu, plus some specials: carne asada chips, bratwurst, their version of a cheesesteak and the ever-popular combination of chips and guacamole.

How popular? Americans mash around 8 million pounds of the fruit. But the inclusion of brats reflects another bit of big game data: Super Sunday ranks second to July 4th in terms of grilling.

“Slow braised meats and sausage—it’s that good comfort food,” chef Dan Elinan at the Hyatt Regency Monterey points out. “At the end of the day, our crowd wants good tri-tip, good beer.”

Elinan will be preparing tri-tip and other specials for the party at Knuckles Sports Bar inside the Hyatt. And they are adding to their panorama of 24 flat screens, hauling in a couple of 8-foot monitors into an adjacent, theater-style viewing room.

With screens that big you can really see how close the refs allow defenders to get to Tom Brady before they reach for the cloth.

But the staff at Knuckles not ignoring the American penchant for finger foods on the big day. The popular sports bar will still offer their regular lineup.

“We’ll have wings,” Elinan promises. “I snack on those things all the time.”

Now, wings weren’t available at watch parties for Super Bowl I. Well, OK. They were around—technically. Wings as we know them were invented in 1964 at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, but did not become widely popular until the 1980s.

Nachos probably weren’t on tables, either. Yeah, the accepted stories have them as an impromptu creation in 1943. So yeah, technically they could’ve been served somewhere. But it took Howard Cosell and his Monday Night Football broadcasting cohorts yapping incessantly about them during one game to turn nachos into a national obsession. And that was in the early ’70s.

Same for guacamole. Sure the Aztecs reportedly spread avocado on whatever it is Aztecs ate. And yes, the favored Hass avocado first grew in a California backyard in the 1930s. Only when Diana Kennedy’s slap at Tex-Mex in her 1972 book The Cuisines of Mexico backfired did it become the dip of choice.

You see, Kennedy revered Mexico’s regional cooking and considered the Tex-Mex combo plate an abomination. When she dismissed it in print as something distinct from true Mexican, readers took it as a compliment.

We’ve been stuck with canned refried beans and orange-tinted rice ever since.

Of course, dips were commonplace thanks to Lipton. When interest in their packets of instant soup dried out—no, I have no shame—in the 1950s, clever marketing folk suggested a campaign urging people to mix the stuff with sour cream.

But salsa? Nah. That stuff from New York City—”New York City!”—finally topped ketchup in 1991.

Come to think of it, they didn’t even use the phrase Super Bowl in 1967. Fans gathered at AFL-NFL World Championship Game parties.

Catchy. Potluck affairs, probably—celery with pimento spread, fondue, cans of Schlitz, bottles of Boone’s Farm, that sort of thing.

Nowadays there’s surprising diversity in the foods served at game parties.

“Super Bowl foods are so regional,” Elinan says.

If Google search numbers are an indication of America’s culinary soul on Super Sunday—and there’s no reason to think otherwise, is there?—tastes vary from state to state.

According to a 2018 USA Today article, dill pickle dip with dried beef was the top recipe search by Alaskans. In Rhode Island, more residents looked for baked ziti than any other recipe. For Iowans, it was stromboli and in Arkansas, five bean chili.

Um...As anyone who has spent time in neighboring Texas knows, there’s so much wrong in that. Five things, to be precise.

Not sure what to make of the most popular search from folks in Nebraska. A cream cheese jalapeno hamburger recipe?

There were other inexplicable searches in the state-by-state listing. How do people in Georgia not know how to piece together a ham, bologna and turkey sub?

Ah, but a second list from 2018, also unearthed from Google searches, tells a very different tale. According to a list compiled by General Mills, Alaskans needed potato salad recipes. Those in Rhode Island wanted chili. In Iowa, the search was on for pigs in a blanket—although that might need to be taken literally.

In this study, sausage cheese balls came second only to chili in popularity, claiming four states to chili’s five.

What the hell?

Turns out that General Mills culled through data from searches of particular sites—Betty Crocker, Pillsbury and the like.

Great. So which dish really claimed the most searched prize in California. One says wings, the other gives it to fried rice. And it’s not a reviewable survey.

Damn NFL officiating. Maybe that’s the reason we need to party.

As Hein points out, “it’s so fun to have 200 people wandering around.”