‘Boneless’ chicken wings can have bones, the Ohio Supreme Court says

While the name may suggest otherwise, “boneless” chicken wings are not guaranteed to be free of bones, as decided Thursday by the Ohio Supreme Court.

The 4-3 verdict was decided against Michael Berkheimer, a patron who filed the suit against a restaurant and its chicken suppliers in 2017, after swallowing a bone from what was marketed as a boneless wing.

According to court documents, Berkheimer was a regular at Wings on Brookwood, a chicken wing restaurant in Hamilton, Ohio. The day after feeling ill from a meal in 2016, Berkheimer went to the emergency room, where doctors found a bone lodged in his esophagus.

The thin, 1 and three-eighths inch bone tore his esophagus, which got infected and led to two surgeries.

His lawsuit claimed that the restaurant and its suppliers were negligent in failing to warn him that the “boneless” could contain bones. The case was initially dismissed at the trial court, but multiple appeals brought it up to the state Supreme Court.

On Thursday, Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled that the restaurant and its suppliers were not liable for Berkheimer’s injury, deciding that “boneless” referred to a cooking style, rather than a true guarantee.

Writing for the Court majority, Justice Joseph T. Deters said, “A diner reading ‘boneless wings’ on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating ‘chicken fingers’ would know that he had not been served fingers.”

Dissenting Justices argued that a jury should have been allowed to determine whether the restaurant and suppliers were negligent, and called Deters’ reasoning “utter jabberwocky.”

“When they read the word ‘boneless,’ they think that it means ‘without bones,’ as do all sensible people,” wrote Justice Michael P. Donnelly in dissent.