Food pilgrimage: Buffalo wings in Buffalo, part 2
The scene: With long cold winters, two major universities, sports obsession, and a long history of beer brewing, Buffalo had the perfect preconditions to be the birthplace of the hot chicken wing. As detailed in Part 1 last week, the now globally famous dish was invented in 1964 at the mom and pop owned Anchor Bar in the city’s downtown and immediately spawned a local industry.
Pundits largely credit the Buffalo Bills with popularizing the wing. The only team in history to finish second by losing the Super Bowl four years in a row, 1991-1994, they put the dish in front of the nation’s largest TV audience year after year, with the prerequisite local vignettes showing restaurants tossing fried wings in hot sauce. This made wings synonymous with sports and a sports bar standard (to their credit, the Bills did win back-to-back titles in 1964 and 1965). This season’s finale, Super Bowl 50, will be the 25th anniversary of that first Bills loss, and Americans are expect to consume more than 1.25 billion wings that one Sunday.
Food pilgrimage: Buffalo wings in Buffalo, part 1
But in Buffalo, hot wings are far more than sports bar food, or even bar food — most residents get their wings delivered from pizzerias. Pizza is hugely popular in Buffalo, and most pizzerias serve the standard assortment of five styles: mild, medium, hot, and extra-hot, plus barbecue, a newcomer closely associated with pizza joints. Then there are the wing emporiums, most famously the Anchor Bar and Duff’s, along with favorite local haunts such as Bar Bill, and when you go to specialists, the flavor choices multiply. Wings are also on the menus of non-wing restaurants of every ilk, from local Chinese eateries to pretty much every bar in town.
Finally, there is a whole genre of spin-off dishes based on the flavor of the famed Buffalo hot wing, with or without any chicken. The Anchor Bar offers a pulled pork sandwich “Buffalo-style,” Buffalo chicken salad and even spicy hot chicken-wing soup. You can get a Buffalo-style cupcake, topped with a chicken wing, and even Buffalo-style toast for breakfast.
Buffalonians love arguing about wings almost as much as they love eating them, and everyone I spoke to during my visit had obviously given the matter a great deal of thought and was very opinionated on the issue. “You have the famous places that have become known for wings, but to me the best spots are all the little taverns in South Buffalo, mmmm ... ” said Harry Zemsky, owner of Hydraulic Hearth, a wood-fired restaurant, nano-brewery and beer garden. “Chicken wings in Buffalo are like coffee in New York City — you can get it on every corner, but locals are loyal to a particular place in their neighborhood,” said Drew Cerza, aka the Wing King. Creator of the city’s big annual National Chicken Wing Festival, Cerza is a tireless promoter of the city’s famous dish.
Reason to visit: Buffalo hot wings at Duff’s, barbecue wings at Bocce Club Pizza, barbecue and creative wings at Bar Bill, Buffalo-style toast at Five Points Bakery.
The food: Ask locals where to get the best wings and you’ll get a lot of different answers, but the two most prevalent recommendations I encountered were Duff’s, a wing-centric mini-chain specialist that is Anchor Bar’s main high-profile rival, and Bar Bill, a neighborhood tavern in the suburb of East Aurora that routinely wins various local newspaper and magazine “Best of Buffalo” awards. The only criticism I was able to elicit of Bar Bill was that it is too far from downtown. Bar Bill, says Cerza, “has the best combination of wings and atmosphere. It’s what [Anchor Bar] used to be. You could be sitting at the bar between the CEO of Fisher-Price and the guy who just blacktopped your driveway, all drinking beer and eating wings and chatting.” The tavern sits on the quaint main street of picturesque East Aurora, where the famed toy company Fisher-Price (now owned by Mattel) has been based since its founding in 1930.
Cash-only Bar Bill is typically crowded, with a wait, and has a glassed-in street-level porch of sorts, then a few steps up to the main bar and dining room. It features heavy, worn wood tables and chairs with a pub feel, and serves up a laundry list of wing flavors way beyond the big five, including Honey Dijon, Zesty Honey Pepper, Teriyaki, Cajun, Spicy Asian and several others. To further complicate things, Cajun, which is a dry rub with no sauce at all, can also be combined with other flavors for an added dimension. Fortunately plates can be split to try more things.
The two signatures, besides the excellent traditional hot wings, are Honey Butter BBQ and Sicilian. Many locals believe these are the best barbecue wings in town, caramelized into a glaze. They lived up to their lofty billing and are exceptional, with very tasty sauce. The Cajun is reminiscent of Memphis- or Texas-style dry barbecue ribs, just a bit spicy and much less messy. They really showcase the crispiness of properly fried Buffalo wings, and in general, almost all the wings I tried on this trip were a reminder of how poorly some places in the rest of the country do wings that are broiled or roasted in ovens on sheets. Deep fried is clearly the way to go.
The standard for Buffalo wings is medium, with a mix of butter and hot sauce, typically based on the Frank’s RedHot brand. The medium wings at Bar Bill are very good, but could use more sauce. The only miss in my opinion was the odd Sicilian, with wings tossed in what tastes like garlicky Italian salad dressing then coated with cheese, interesting but not nearly as flavorful as any of the alternatives. Wing King Cerza mentioned that in Buffalo, wings are often consumed as a main course rather than a starter, and looking around Bar Bill, there were plenty of tables doing just that, such as four guys in suits gathered around an after-work dinner consisting entirely of heaping plates of wings and beer.
Duff’s was another neighborhood bar that started serving the city’s newfangled snack back in 1969, just five years after it was invented at the Anchor Bar, and became so proficient that the focus was shifted and the joint renamed itself Duff’s Famous Wings. Today there are four satellite locations around Buffalo, including Orchard Park, where the Bills play, and Niagara Falls, the city’s main tourism draw. There is also a Duff’s in Toronto, and a random outpost in Southlake, Texas. The original has a great location smack between the city’s two universities on a busy commercial road lined with car dealerships and strip malls, and gets a lot of students and visiting families. From the outside it looks like it should be a 1950s hot dog stand, with some picnic tables out front, white stucco, and windows covered with red awnings. You walk directly in at the bar, then are seated in a sort of industrial-feeling dining room, with rows of simple black tables. Floors are linoleum, walls have dated wood and brick siding and are covered with old black-and-white photos of Buffalo. Service is efficient but very friendly, they sell a lot of wings, and tables are covered with plenty of napkins and buckets for bone disposal. For a pure wing destination, Duff’s was the best I found.
Duff’s claim to fame is heat, and the menu (and the back of servers’ T-shirts) clearly reads “Warning! Medium IS HOT, Medium Hot IS VERY HOT and Hot is VERY, VERY HOT." There are several other grades including mild, mild medium and medium light, all below medium. Above the hot are the options of adding either suicidal or death sauce. Like the Anchor Bar, Duff’s only does traditional hot wings and barbecue, but also offers a spicier Hot BBQ. There are sandwiches and burgers, but looking around, everyone comes for wings — including President Obama, who chose Duff’s when he visited Buffalo in 2010.
“Our medium light is the equivalent of medium at other places,” said the waitress, so we tried both that and the medium. The medium light was my favorite traditional wing of the trip, hitting the perfect sweet spot of balance between spice and flavor, as well as between saucy and dry. While the Anchor Bar wings were too wet, and the Bar Bill version could use more sauce, these were the Goldilocks wings: just right. The medium were also excellent, and as advertised, appreciably spicier, good for lovers of hotter foods, while heat fanatics can go further up the scale. Every plate is made to order, so it takes a little while, but wings are served hot, very crispy and fresh. Both Duff’s and Anchor Bar ship their wings nationwide on regional food delivery sites like FoodyDirect.com and Goldbely.com.
While the hot-wing cupcake was a savory novelty that looked better than it tasted, one notable variant stood out on my visit. Five Points Bakery and Toast Cafe is in the rebounding Five Points neighborhood. After becoming popular for its artisan breads, the owners opened the unique toast cafe, which as the name suggests, serves only toast dishes, with several house specialty variations. The Buffalo-style toast is actually called just “Extra Sharp Cheddar,” but that is the name of the bread used, a whole grain loaf studded with sizeable chunks of very sharp cheese. Toast is served with a pitcher of hot sauce and a side of delicious French St. Agur blue cheese. You spread some cheese on the toast, pour on the hot sauce, and you get the flavor of the wing for breakfast, well worth seeking out.
The most venerable and popular pizzeria in town is Bocce Club, locally popular for barbecue wings, which Cerza recommended. The wings are very good, comparable to Bar Bill’s barbecue in quality, and Bocce is well worth visiting for its distinctive style of pizza, but for a wing-centric crawl it is more efficient to simply visit one of the specialists.
What regulars say: “”I’m fifth generation here, so Frank’s hot sauce is in my blood,” said Kevin Gardner, owner of the Five Points Bakery and Toast Cafe.
Pilgrimage-worthy?: Yes, the Buffalo wing is one of America’s most beloved and distinctive regional foods, and between the traditional at Duff’s and creative variants at Bar Bill, it does not get much better.
Rating: Duff’s: OMG!; Bar Bill: Yum!; Five Points: Yum! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)
Price: $-$$ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)
Details: Bar Bill Tavern, 185 Main Street, East Aurora, N.Y.; 716-652-7959; barbill.com; Duff’s Famous Wings, Original 3651 Sheridan Drive, Amherst, N.Y.; 716-834-6234; duffswings.com; Five Points Bakery & Toast Cafe, 44 Brayton Street, Buffalo, N.Y.; 716-884-8888; fivepointsbakery.com
Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an email at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.