Hooligans Sports Bar

The order at Hooligans usually starts the same way: a basket of wings lands first, and the rest of the table builds out from there. Nachos for the middle, a Hooligan Burger for the one who never wavers, a Philly Cheese Steak for whoever showed up hungry. This is a north-end Niagara Falls sports bar on Portage Road, in Stamford, well back from the casino-and-falls corridor, and it runs on the logic of the group plate — shareable, fast to the table, easy to agree on. The room fills with people who came for the game and stayed for a second round.

The menu is wider than the wings-and-burgers shorthand suggests. The three orders the kitchen is known for — Chicken Wings, the Hooligan Burger, and the Philly Cheese Steak — anchor a board that runs deep into pub territory: nachos, poutine and Buffalo chicken poutine, fish and chips, garlic bread with cheese, fresh-cut fries, mozza sticks, deep-fried pickles. Then it wanders a little. Wontons turn up next to the perogies in the appetizers. There is escargot on the same list that sells a meatball sub, and a chicken shawarma wrap a few lines down from the chicken Caesar. The pizza, the BLT, the pulled-pork sandwich, the panzarotti — the kind of breadth that means a table of five never has to compromise down to a single lane.