The Buffalo wing and its endurance owes a lot to women.
This sports bar staple, which is often coated in sauce and served with creamy ranch or blue cheese dressing, might be commonly associated with male-dominated spaces, but lore traces this specific flavor combination back to one woman in particular.
Teressa Bellissimo is said to have forever altered bar menus when she picked up a bottle of hot sauce and chopped up full chicken wings into drumsticks and flats at her restaurant Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York.
According to the National Chicken Council and other reports, Bellissimo chopped leftover wings in half, added hot sauce and cooked them up as a late-night snack at the request of her son in 1964. The rest is history.
These days, Buffalo wings are synonymous with sports-centric venues, and there’s good reason for that. Wings, like many comfort foods, have played a significant role in bringing people together and fostering conversations. So it’s understandable that bar owners and managers view them as essential items for their menus.
Gracie O’Malley’s is a popular Chicago sports bar serving eight different styles of wings including bone-in, boneless and grilled. Operating partner KJ Johnson tells TODAY.com her team has noticed how the various options facilitate interaction and sharing at the pub — sort of like how a big family might gather around a table and share food for dinner.
“There’s something about community with wings,” Johnson explains. “I feel like a lot of the people will just get up and share them. There’s just something about sharing them that people like.”
Jill Homorodean is a proprietor of Blondie’s, a beloved sports bar in New York City known for its wings. Blondie’s dishes out its Buffalo wings in orders of 10, buckets and party platters. Homorodean estimates they sell nearly two tons of wings during the Super Bowl every year.
“People love our wings,” she said. “We’ve added new flavors. We always make sure that the quality of the wings is stellar because that’s what people love. I would say the wings are our food calling cards.” Homorodean says customers come to Blondie’s for the wings but end up ordering and enjoying other dishes, too.
John Young, a pioneering Black restaurateur, is also often credited with the invention of chicken wings in Buffalo. Back in the day, he was slinging poultry doused in a sauce of his own making at his restaurant Wings and Things.
In 1960, not far from where Anchor bar stood, Young opened his own establishment. According to History.com, Young’s iconic menu item might have been inspired by a popular Washington, D.C., condiment: Mumbo sauce. The restaurateur brought the elements of this Capital city sauce to Buffalo, where his restaurant became well-known for its breaded, whole Mumbo Wings.
Jenny Nguyen, owner of The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon, didn’t know about Young and his non-Buffalo sauce, Buffalo-style wings. Still, she managed to pay homage on her menu by combining his creativity with Bellissimo’s ingenuity, serving up smaller wings in a sauce of her own making.
Speaking to TODAY.com Nguyen says she knew the importance of including ever-reliable menu items when she first launched The Sports Bra — a bar showing exclusively women’s sports on TVs.
“There were about 67 questions for writing a business plan, and I only knew the answer to one,” she tells TODAY.com. The question was “What kind of food do you want at your place?”
“That was the first thing I ever did other than name the place ‘The Sports Bra.’ I wrote the menu,” she continued, “and it took me 20 minutes.”
A variant of Buffalo wings, called “Aunt Tina’s Vietna-Wings,” was part of that quick first-round food draft. Inspired by her own aunt’s recipe, the item is gluten-free. The chicken wings are fried, glazed, garnished with cilantro and served over a cabbage slaw.
They’re not exactly the spot’s top seller, but there’s a reason they’ve stayed on the menu. She explains to TODAY.com that “In Vietnam, we use lobster sauce, so (the wings) contain fish sauce. And I think for like your average pub goer that that description might be a turn off for some. But the people who do get it, they get it every time.”
Bellissimo likely didn’t understand the lasting impact her late-night creation would have on decades of bar menus to come. But her legacy also lives on in each and every female bar owner and manager who serves up this finger-food dish today.
As we can see now, Bellissimo forever altered the landscape of restaurant staples on that fateful night at her bar. And, today, women continue to bring ingenuity to this corner of the culinary sphere, creating menus that cater to a diverse range of tastes and preferences. So the next time you head to a sports bar, maybe raise a wing to them.
