Eat: Buffalo

Famed for its eponymous wings, New York State’s second-biggest city is finding a new audience for its home-spun fast food. And there’s a distinctly local feel to the city’s take on Americana food culture. Words: Neil Davey

Not just the home of the eponymous wings

To my left, there are people diving face first into a paddling pool of blue cheese sauce. To my right, there are girls on stage explaining why they deserve to be crowned Miss Buffalo Wing 2019.

And, surrounding me, in the temporarily repurposed Sahlen Field baseball stadium, there are tens of thousands of people preparing chicken wings, serving chicken wings, queuing for chicken wings, eating chicken wings and talking chicken wings. Frankly, Bill Murray has a lot to answer for.

Yes. Bill Murray; that Bill Murray. There are many places that are big on food tourism — Venice, Bangkok, Tokyo, Padstow — but few lend their name to one of the world’s most popular dishes. Buffalo, New York is the home of the Buffalo chicken wing, and the brilliant chaos that owes its invention to Bill Murray is the National Buffalo Wing Festival.

“There was a movie back in 2001 called Osmosis Jones,” festival founder Drew ‘The Wing King’ Cerza tells me. “Bill Murray’s character was a big junk food eater who loved chicken wings and was travelling to the Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo. But, in 2001, Buffalo didn’t have a festival dedicated to chicken wings. Our local paper wrote an article that all these wings around the world are branded with the name of our city, why don’t we have a festival? I was a food promoter at the time and one thing led to another and here we are.”

And thus, on Labor Day weekend 2002, the National Buffalo Wing Festival began. Fast forward 17 years and the festival has grown to a quite incredible level. Once the dust has settled, the ‘dipping for wings’ blue cheese paddling pool has been tidied away, Miss Buffalo Wing 2019 has been crowned and a surprisingly slight man called Geoffrey Esper has won the United States Chicken Wing Eating Championship (281 wings in 12 minutes), it’s all over for another year. Drew tells me that this year’s festival involved some 55,000 visitors and 24 tons of wings.

It’s a remarkable achievement, but then Buffalo is a remarkable place. It’s New York

State’s second-biggest city but, like so many places with an industrial heritage, the last few decades have been tough. However, Buffalo feels like it’s bouncing back. Old buildings are being repurposed to great effect, from the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane — which is now the impressively luxurious (if allegedly haunted) Hotel Henry — to the huge riverside grain elevators that now house, among other things, chic bars, breweries and a zip-line experience.

While new life is creeping in, it’s the city’s historic culinary heritage that’s also finding a fresh, appreciative audience outside of Buffalonian circles.

We have to start with Buffalo wings, of course, and that means a pilgrimage to the Anchor Bar, the place where it all started. On a weekday lunchtime, the place is packed with a good mix of locals — positioned around the bar, drinking beer, watching sports — and tourists who have come to the source for, well, the sauce.

Having heard various versions of the origin story, I ask Mark Dempsey, CEO and partner of the Anchor Bar, to tell me how Buffalo wings came to be.

“In 1935, the Anchor Bar started as an Italian restaurant, owned by Frank and Teressa [Bellissimo],” Mark explains. “They moved to this location in 1942 and, in 1964, on a cold night in March, their son Dominic was tending bar. Some of his friends came in and wanted something a little different than the standard Italian fare. Teressa was in the kitchen, she had these chicken wings she’d been planning to use for stock, and instead she fried them up and put a cayenne pepperbased sauce on top, with garlic and vinegar. She added butter to calm the heat down, and celery and a blue cheese sauce to do the same.

“They kind of looked at them like, ‘what are these things?’ But once they started eating them, they were sold. The wings went on the menu a couple of months later and, slowly, word started spreading around Buffalo about this new dish. They gained popularity in the 1970s and blossomed in the 80s.”

And blossom they did. The original

Anchor Bar serves around 5,000 people and 2,000lbs of wings a day — not including the 15 franchise operations across Canada and the US, the FedEx deliveries (“Christmas and Super Bowl are our busy times,” explains Mark), or the 4,000 supermarkets that sell their original sauce. More than that, and because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, a raft of alternative — and, frequently, very good — wing places sprang up around town: the city’s official Buffalo Wing Trail features the Anchor Bar and 12 other local rivals.

While the flap over chicken wings cemented Buffalo’s reputation, they’re only part of the story. For those in the know, Buffalo’s original claim to culinary fame

ABOVE: A colourful mural on Elmwood Avenue OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: A bartender mixes dram box cocktails at Frank Lloyd Wright Fontana Boathouse; Anchor Bar, where Buffalo wings were invented in 1964; a meatloaf sandwich at Swan Street Diner; the view southwards down Main Street in downtown

Buffalo wings at Bar-Bill Tavern RIGHT: Mini doughnuts at Swan Street Diner