“Home of the Chicken Wing” keychain

LOVED FOR:  Celebrate Buffalo’s best-known contribution to the food scene! (And as every chicken wing aficionado knows, it’s blue cheese: NEVER ranch!)  Perfect for the backpack or purse.

GOOD TO KNOW:  Plastic, 3.5 x 2.25 inches with stainless split chain ring. (Approximately the size of a business card.)  * NOT A TOY; NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN.

BUFFALOVE:  Buffalo is renowned as the home of chicken wings! (And we ALL know, it's not a "buffalo wing") The 1964 origin story says spicy chicken wings were first created by Teresa Bellissimo, who owned the Anchor Bar with her husband Frank. According to her son Dominic, upon his unannounced, late-night arrival with several of his friends from college, Teresa needed a fast and easy snack to feed them. It was then that she came up with the idea of deep frying chicken wings (normally thrown away or reserved for stock) and tossing them in cayenne hot sauce.  Dominic Bellissimo told The New Yorker reporter Calvin Trillin in 1980, “It was Friday night in the bar and since people were buying a lot of drinks he wanted to do something nice for them at midnight when the mostly Catholic patrons would be able to eat meat again.” That’s when his mother came up with the recipe for chicken wings.

A competing claim is that John Young, and African American who moved to Buffalo from Alabama in 1948, began serving uncut chicken wings that were breaded, deep fried and served in his own special tomato-based “Mambo sauce” at his Buffalo restaurant, beginning in 1961. Before he opened his restaurant he had had a conversation with a boxer and in a later interview Young recalled: “He told me that there was a restaurant in Washington, D.C. that was doing a good business with wings and I decided to specialize.” He registered the name of his restaurant, John Young’s Wings ‘n Things, at the Erie County courthouse before leaving the Buffalo area in 1970. In 2013, at the National Buffalo Wing Festival, held in Buffalo, John Young’s contributions were acknowledged when he was inducted into the festival’s National Buffalo Wing Hall of Flame.