Fred Marcantonio had a mission to provide the community of Plainville, Connecticut, with its very own hometown sports bar. It was amazing to him that even with the mega presence of ESPN in Bristol, there wasn’t a great family-friendly sports bar in the area. The enormous satellite dishes loomed large over the region, broadcasting games across the country, yet local sports fans like himself didn’t have a community watering hole to call home.
Fred had a vision. Sliders would become a bustling sports bar buzzing with excitement during the big games as jersey-wearing fans leaned over their bar stools in anticipation, loud bursts of cheers erupting with each big play. The steady hum and energy of the packed crowd would feel contagious. Plates of sizzling chicken wings and frosted pints of ice-cold beer would make their rounds through the restaurant. In 1993, Fred turned these dreams into reality and opened the doors to Sliders Grill & Bar.
Word spread quickly, and the fan base grew. Fast forward three decades, and today there are five locations spread across central Connecticut: Berlin, Middletown, Plainville, Southington, and Wallingford. We proudly serve CT’s best wings and all-American fan favorites like burgers, wraps, and flatbreads to hundreds of guests daily. Sliders serves a variety of exceptional craft and regional brews, with each location dedicating nine of its 20 taps to local breweries, representing the nine players on a baseball field.
Award-Winning Wings
We owe much of our success to our legendary lineup of award-winning wings. Our wings are always homemade, fresh, and never frozen, with dozens of sauces and dry rubs to keep the flavors fresh and exciting. On Super Bowl Sunday alone, we cook over 110,000 wings!
Sliders’ wings have earned national and local recognition, winning hundreds of local best-of awards. The Wingaddicts, a community of passionate wing lovers, put Sliders on their Mount Crushmore of CT’s Best Wings. In 2013, 2014, and 2015, Sliders won titles for best wings at the National Buffalo Wing Competition held annually in Buffalo, NY.
Superior Sports Experience
Sports fans want it all – NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, soccer, golf, the Olympics, and more. Sliders has dozens of big-screen TVs you can comfortably view throughout each restaurant from every table, so every seat is “the best seat in the house.”
The energy that fills a packed sports bar during a big game is hard to quantify unless you’re there. We’ve shown every legendary game since 1993 at Sliders. We’re so proud to be part of the memories of those big games – historic victories like the first UConn Mens’ Basketball National Championship in 1999, plus the three more that followed. We were there from the beginning when UConn Womens’ Basketball began their complete and utter dominance of the sport, winning 11 National Championships.
Sliders has shared the sweet victory of 22 championships for local pro teams – New England Patriots (6), New York Yankees (5), Boston Red Sox (4), New York Giants (2), New Jersey Devils (2), Boston Celtics (1), Boston Bruins (1), and New York Rangers (1). These victories were so much sweeter because they were shared with friends – that’s what Sliders is all about! It’s no surprise that ESPN Magazine voted Sliders the #5 Best Sports Bar in the country in 2011.
The Sliders Experience
We’ve been honored to have some amazing people visit us at Sliders over the years – pro football and TV personality Michael Strahan, American food critic Daym Drops, Man vs. Food’s Adam Richman, and pro football Tony “The Goose” Siragusa, among others.
From the moment we power on all the flat-screen TVs to the moment the last batch of wings comes out of the fryer, we strive to make the Sliders experience epic for everyone who walks through our doors.
