On the Road in America - 500 Places for Food and Wine Lovers - page 184

Hometown Dish

199

Buffalo Wings
Watch Out for Flying Buffalos
Buffalo, New York

Nowadays, all sorts of foods that have
been deep-fried and sauced up with cay-
enne pepper are called “buffalo-style” this
and “buffalo-style” that, playing on the
association with Buffalo hot wings. In Buf-
falo, New York, though, nobody refers to
their most famous local dish as Buffalo
anything—they're just hot chicken wings,
or hot wings, or wings. How else would a
chicken wing be prepared around here?
The birthplace of Buffalo-style chicken
wings is generally acknowledged to be the
Anchor Bar. Run by Frank and Teresa Bel-
lisimo, this watering hole on the edge of
downtown first opened in 1935. It wasn't
until a late Friday night in October 1964,
however, that Teresa first threw together
this hot bar snack. In desperation, she
grabbed some chicken wings she'd been
saving for stock, chopped them into easy-
to-hold halves (drumettes and bows), then
threw them in a deep-fryer and coated
them in a buttery hot pepper sauce. That
zesty sauce was just right for awakening
the taste buds after midnight, especially
contrasted with the cool creamy blue-
cheese dressing Teresa serves on the
side, along with a few palate-cleansing
stalks of crunchy celery. And of course it
didn't hurt that the wings soon made cus-
tomers thirsty enough to order another
round of beers.
Anchor soon became famous for its hot
wings—which were, of course, then cop-
ied all over town, supplanting Buffalo's
previous favorite bar food, beef on weck.
(This delicious sandwich—thin-shaved
rare roast beef piled on a hard roll spat-
tered with salt crystals and caraway seeds
and served au jus—is also on the Anchor's

menu, of course.) But while beef on weck
remains a treat exclusive to Buffalo, in the
1980s Buffalo hot wings began to appear
on menus all over the nation, including
some later incarnations in which the wings
were breaded before deep-frying—heresy
to Buffalo wing purists.
There's something about a Buffalo win-
ter that makes the heat of hot wings par-
ticularly inviting here, where they were
invented. Behind its blank brick facade,
the Anchor Bar still looks like the boozy
wood-trimmed hangout it always was,
except for a clutter of framed clippings
and celebrity photos and the wall full of
license plates donated by visitors from all
over the country. Teresa's and Frank's son
Dominic still tends bar here. The rest of
the menu includes sandwiches, pizzas,
and a few Italian standards, but wings
remain Anchor Bar's claim to fame. Theirs
are meaty, unbreaded (of course), and
sheathed in that special slick chili sauce,
which Anchor now sells by the bottle. You
can usually catch visiting sports stars, in
town to play the Bills football team or the
Sabres hockey team, chowing down at the
Anchor Bar the night before their games—
those wings are too tempting to resist.

1047 Main St. ( & 716/886-8920; www.
buffalowings.com).
( Buffalo International (9 1 ⁄ 3 miles/15km).

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414 Delaware Ave. ( & 716/886-3300;
www.mansionondelaware.com). $$ Com-
fort Suites Downtown, 601 Main St.
( & 800/424-6423 or 716/854-5500; www.
choicehotels.com).