on the sidethe pitcher

Draught beer sold by the jug for a table to share. It is the other half of a wing order almost everywhere wings are sold, and in two traditions it is named into the food: Hooters built its concept on wings and beer, and Korean has a single word for the pairing.

Korean has the cleaner record of it. The first modern Korean fried chicken franchise, Lims Chicken, opened in 1977 in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store on Chungmu-ro in Seoul, founded by Yu Seok-ho, and was "embraced as an excellent food pairing for draft beer". The word for that pairing, chimaek, is a portmanteau of chicken and maekju, the Korean word for beer. Pickled radishes and beer or carbonated drinks are the standard accompaniment to Korean fried chicken.

American bars said the same thing in marketing rather than in vocabulary. Hooters, founded in 1983, has put it plainly: "Customers can go to many places for wings and beer." Almost all Hooters restaurants hold licences to sell beer and wine. When a location closed, the company's own notice thanked its guests for "the many years of great times, cold beer, hot wings, and unforgettable memories shared here."

Inference — the pitcher is why the wing became bar food rather than restaurant food. Salt and heat sell drink, the drink carries the margin, and the wing was cheap enough in 1964 to be given away against it. Beef on weck is said to have worked the same trick in Buffalo a century earlier, with salt on a roll.

Pour from the pitcher into glasses at the table and keep pouring. Cold and light against salt, fat and cayenne; a dark or a high-alcohol beer fights the sauce rather than clearing it. Where a pitcher is not sold, the same job goes to a bucket of bottles, a soda refill, or in Korea to a shared bottle of lager.

Standard at American sports bars, and at Korean fried chicken shops that built the pairing into the language. Tradition holds — wing night and pitcher pricing move together, and a bar that drops one usually drops both.