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Who Really Created the Buffalo Chicken Wing?
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Apr 1, 2025
Weird History Food is going to get messy with this saucy history of the Buffalo Wing. Nobody needs to dispute that Buffalo Wings started in Buffalo, New York, but really who was the first person to create the Buffalo Wing? Get some extra napkins and maybe a wet wipe, but this spicy video has all you need to know about hot wings and more.
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0:00
Grab the blue cheese and the celery sticks, it's time for another hot one
0:05
It's spicy, it's small, it has a mysterious past. It's like the El Chapo of American cuisine
0:12
And while its name may bring about visions of flying bison, its burning flavor can wipe away all thought and send even the brawniest among us reeling
0:20
Is there a toilet nearby quickly? Do you mind? I've got a piece. Is it nearby? So, today on Weird History Food
0:26
Join us as we crank up the heat with the history of buffalo wings
0:32
All right, keep some dairy handy. Things are about to heat up
0:39
While the true origins of the buffalo wing remain under dispute, there is no doubt about where it came from
0:49
Buffalo, New York, the city of good neighbors. But depending on who you talk to, one of two restaurants was the first to start setting mouths deliciously aflame
0:59
For years, the going national belief was that Sicily-born Teresa Bellissimo invented the buffalo wing in 1964
1:08
She and her husband, Frank, no relation to the hot sauce, opened their buffalo-based Anchor Bar in 1935
1:14
Over the following decades, the business grew into a bustling family operation
1:18
and their son, Dominic, eventually worked there as a bartender. If you open a family restaurant, you have to have at least one son named Dominic who works there
1:27
Listen, man, who doesn't spend time in this family can never be a real man. Legend has it that one fateful Friday in March, a group of Roman Catholic regulars eagerly awaited the stroke of midnight
1:37
so that they could indulge in something a bit more savory after abstaining for meat on that Friday in Lent
1:43
While the bar kept chicken wings on hand for making broth, these customers were too meat-starved for mere soup
1:49
Lisa, I want some more. So Dominic, who was working the bar at the time
1:54
asked his mother to fix these regulars up something special. Teresa decided to flex her creativity and try something entirely new
2:01
She deep fried the wings and whipped up a special secret cayenne pepper-based sauce for them
2:06
And voila! American bar food was changed in an instant. From pit stops of desperation to something you actually order on purpose
2:15
To this day, the Anchor Bar, which has grown into a national chain, holds firm to their claim of having created the world's first buffalo wings
2:23
They attribute it all to Teresa's innovation, and they assert that their wings are not only the first in the world, but also the best
2:30
But like with any good idea, not everyone is in agreement over who came up with it
2:34
Meet John Young. On Buffalo's east side, Young had a restaurant called Wings and Things
2:41
There, Young served up wings covered in his now-famous mumbo sauce. The sauce is spicy, tangy, and orange-red, and it comes from similar recipes that were first developed in Chicago and later made into a Washington, D.C. staple
2:55
Young who passed away in 1998 claimed that his mumbo wings predated Bellissimo recipe by three whole years maybe more He also argued that he been selling them by the thousands as early as 1961
3:08
and that by 1962, he was selling over 5,000 pounds of chicken wings each and every year
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That's a lot of bird appendages. To add insult to injury, Young even said that Frank Bellissimo
3:21
himself was a regular wing-loving customer, insinuating that Frank stole Young's hot wings
3:26
idea for himself. Talk about spicy goss. After the Buffalo race riots of 1967, Young shut down
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his business and left town for Illinois, stating he didn't learn that someone else was claiming to
3:38
have invented the Buffalo wing until years later. Some have disputed Young's claim, though. Remember
3:44
that thing we said earlier about good ideas? Everyone wants to dip their celery in them
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For instance, Young's business license for wings and things was submitted and processed in 1966
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two whole years after Anchor Bar started serving their hot wings. However, Young, his family, and their loyal customer base
4:00
have pointed out that this doesn't necessarily prove anything, arguing that Young was selling his wings under a different
4:06
potentially unlicensed business name for at least half a decade prior. Still, others further argue against John's claim
4:13
citing that John's recipe did not break his wings up into drumettes and wingettes
4:18
but rather served them whole, unbroken, and breaded, making them an entirely different food from the wings sold at Anchor Bar
4:25
Regardless of whose side you take, buffalo wings were an immediate hit
4:29
and they became commonplace in establishments across the city by the 1970s
4:33
In 1977, Buffalo even declared July 29th Chicken Wing Day, a holiday that has since gone national
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and one that's worthy of every last leftover Fourth of July firework. in 1982 former buffalonians jim disbrow and scott lowry were living in columbus ohio
4:57
they both craved that spicy savory taste of home but they couldn't find buffalo wings anywhere so
5:03
they decided to start a restaurant all their own and to make their hometown's wings themselves
5:08
They called their restaurant Buffalo Wild Wings and WEC, or BW3s for short, or maybe even B-dubs for short, depending on how cool a customer you are
5:17
So what the heck is WEC? Well, the WEC in the name was a reference to Beef on WEC, a type of roast beef sandwich served on a caraway seed studded roll
5:26
It's allegedly another upstate New York classic, but that one never caught on quite like the Wings
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Jim and Scott opened their first BW3s right on the Ohio State University campus
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And Brutus Buckeye soon lost his nutty mind over their wings. BW3s quickly became associated with football, beer, and wounded taste buds
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And they were so successful that they would open up another eight locations across the region over the coming decade
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In 1992, they officially franchised out, opening up another 30 or so locations over just two more years
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And in 1998 the company would officially drop the WECC from its name making it simply Buffalo Wild Wings forever after
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Though it may have been the first major wing chain to go big, B-Dubs wasn't the only one to rise to great success during this time
6:16
Enter Hooters. In Clearwater, Florida, in 1983, a group of six aggressively confident men with no prior restaurant experience wanted to make a restaurant for wing lovers, beer lovers, sports lovers, and..
6:28
owl lovers. So they came up with a name that emphasized what they perceived to be the greatest assets
6:35
of their business model, referencing a Steve Martin bit for inspiration. And you should only refer to them as Hooters
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And so the world's first Hooters restaurant opened up. It was a huge success
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And just one year later, restaurateur Hugh Connerty joined the Hooters Six
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as the company's first ever CEO. Under Connerty's guidance, they aimed to take the enterprise international
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all. While Connerty didn't quite stick with the company long enough to make that happen
7:01
he did expand Hooters up into Tampa, Atlanta, and elsewhere in the American Southeast
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before leaving the company to become CEO of Outback Steakhouse, which notably does not sell
7:12
hot wings. That would be too much thunder for Down Under. In 1985, as Hooters gained national
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name recognition, the company launched its own Hooters Calendar, a bid that found a new face
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for the company in Lynn Austin. Austin soon went from calendar model
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to face of the company, and she was featured in commercials, magazine advertisements
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and even the 1987 television series Hooters Night Owl Theater, featuring comedy sketches
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and the franchise's famous Hooters Girls. Yeah, Hooters had a TV show
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but competition must have been stiff. Night Owl Theater, like the restaurant that inspired it
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was a hit. It reached number one in its time slot and managed to stay on the air for eight years
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which is longer than most TV shows. Though the company faced a setback in 1990
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when they received a class action lawsuit for discriminating against men, a small $3.75 million settlement
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and the promise to get more guys into the kitchens got them back on track
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In 1997, Hooters would expand outside the walls of their restaurants and would find their way into grocery stores everywhere
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They sold Hooters wing sauce, hot sauce, and breading, cementing their place in the history of buffalo wings
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by bringing the good stuff to consumers right at home. All the while, other companies rose to the occasion to provide wings at home, too
8:29
In 1990, McDonald's created the Mighty Wing, a menu item that has come and gone like so many Arch Deluxes in the decades since
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Additionally, Wingstop opened its first restaurant in 1994, promising a to-go buffalo wing experience that rivaled its sit-down competitors
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And that same year, both Domino's and Little Caesars also added wings to their respective menus
8:52
followed a whole nine years later by Pizza Hut. The pizza and the chicken wing would prove to be a formidable takeout duo
9:03
By the year 2000 Buffalo Wings had fully left behind their humble upstate New York origins and had traveled from sea to shining sea
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What was once considered a cheap throwaway chicken part had grown into an expensive American commodity
9:17
On Super Bowl Sunday alone, Americans today eat close to one and a half billion wings
9:24
That's a lot of bones. Too bad you can't reuse them. Over the years, thousands of different flavor profiles have been stirred up and slathered onto wings by innovators the world over
9:33
In just the category of buffalo wing, there are the typical mild, medium, and hot flavors
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but there are also recipes that push the boundaries of what humans can handle
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Buffalo Wild Wings has their wild sauce, blazing knockout sauce, and their desert heat seasoning
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while Hooters offers their terribly hot spicy garlic sauce, Three Mile Island Buffalo sauce, and ghost pepper sauce
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any one of which can make a grown adult cry like an infant, an infant who just ate an incredibly spicy chicken wing
10:05
Wings made up in the traditional Anchor Bar style have also parted ways with spice entirely
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and have branched out into sweeter flavor profiles too, such as barbecue, Hawaiian, and sweet chili
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As more and more hot wing recipes have emerged over the years
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it only made sense to pit new recipes against one another in order to find out which ones are the best and which are the hottest
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Perhaps most prominent among these competitions is the National Buffalo Wing Festival
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the yearly Labor Day weekend event held in Buffalo, New York. 99 kinds of wings, 128 different dipping sauces
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It features dozens of restaurants from across the United States, as each clamors for the top spot in the festival
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Only one is declared the festival favorite, but the others face off in individual categories as well
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including traditional medium, traditional barbecue, creative sweet, and X-Hot. Recipe competitions aside, the festival also features contests in nine separate categories
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most of which require participants to eat as many buffalo wings as possible within a given period of time
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like being hazed by bullies who have no imagination. They even have a bobbing for wings competition
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wherein contestants dunk their faces into baby pools filled with blue cheese dressing
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as they try to grab up as many wings as they can, using only their mouths
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Did we say blue cheese dressing? We meant spit, sweat, skin flakes, boogers, loose hair, and blue cheese dressing
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To some, it's a thrilling way to share a bacterial infection. To others, this might just be what heaven looks like
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In more recent years, in order to combat the ever-increasing price of chicken wings
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many places have begun to offer boneless alternatives. But are boneless wings really wings
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Or just chicken nuggets with a paint job? For most restaurants, it's the latter
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As many boneless wings are actually just chunks of chicken breast covered in sauce
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But honestly, who cares? The bone just gets in the way anyway. The bone just gets in the way anyway
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