Nowadays, if you go into any given bar, there’s a solid chance you’ll find wings on the menu. These tasty morsels have become so popular that many restaurants have made them the centerpiece menu item, but it wasn’t always this way. In the not-so-distant past, wings were considered a lesser cut of the chicken and were more often tossed into the stock pot than served up as the main event. It wasn’t until 1964 that an inventive restaurant co-owner whipped up the now iconic buffalo wing in a late-night bid to feed her hungry son and his friends.
The buffalo wing as we know it today came about as the brainchild of Teressa Bellissimo, co-owner of the Anchor Bar in, you guessed it, Buffalo, New York. As the story goes, Bellissimo’s son and his friends were hanging out late at night when their stomachs started rumbling. With little else on hand, Belissimo threw some leftover chicken wings into a pan with hot sauce and served them up with bleu cheese and celery sticks because that was what she had on hand. The result was a hit, and wings were soon added to the official restaurant menu.
As with all good things, word spread quickly about this new food. Wings really took flight in the ‘90s when major chains like McDonald’s, KFC, and even Domino’s started adding wings to their menus.
After the invention of the buffalo wing, restaurant owners realized that if they served up spicy, salty wings, beer sales tended to increase as people sought to cool the burn with a nice brew. Sports bars were also a budding industry at this time, as TVs and satellite dishes became more common. Wings were a cheap, tasty food that you could easily share with a group, and thus the collaboration between wings and sports bars was firmly cemented.