History & Culture
A bar snack invented after midnight in a small city in upstate New York, built on a sauce that already had forty years of history behind it, and now the default order at every American sports bar.
The story most often told begins on the night of 30 October 1964, at the Anchor Bar on Main Street in Buffalo, New York. According to the version the bar itself has told for decades, owner Teressa Bellissimo needed a late-night snack for her son Dominic and his friends, who'd turned up hungry after a night out. She took chicken wings that would normally have gone into stock, deep-fried them whole rather than breading and baking them, and tossed them in a simple mixture of melted butter and cayenne pepper hot sauce. She served them with celery sticks and a blue cheese dip, mostly because that's what she had to hand behind the bar.
The hot sauce in that mixture is widely believed to have been Frank's RedHot, a vinegar-based cayenne sauce that had been on the market since the 1920s, developed in Louisiana before production later moved north. Frank's has leaned into the connection ever since, and the pairing of butter, cayenne vinegar sauce and fried chicken skin is still the base formula every "buffalo" sauce is judged against.
The Anchor Bar's account isn't the only one. A nearby Buffalo restaurateur named John Young also claimed, in later years, to have been serving a similar fried wing in a sauce he called "mambo sauce" earlier in the same decade. Buffalo's own city government sided with the Anchor Bar version: in 1977, the mayor proclaimed 29 July "Chicken Wing Day" in the bar's honour, and that civic endorsement is a large part of why the Anchor Bar's telling became the accepted one, even though no receipt or menu from that exact night has ever surfaced.
For its first decade or so, the buffalo wing stayed close to home, a Western New York bar snack that visitors would ask after by name but rarely find much beyond the city limits. That started to change through the 1980s. Hooters, founded in Clearwater, Florida in 1983, built its entire menu identity around wings and helped push the format into casual dining chains nationwide. Buffalo Wild Wings followed in 1982 in Ohio, originally trading as "Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck" before shortening its name, and became one of the biggest single drivers of wings as an everyday order rather than a regional curiosity.
Wings also attached themselves early to American football viewing. By the 1990s, Super Bowl Sunday had become one of the single biggest days of the year for wing sales in the United States, a pattern the National Chicken Council still tracks and reports on every year. Buffalo itself leaned into the association it had created, and the National Buffalo Wing Festival, established in the city in the early 2000s, now draws crowds in the tens of thousands over a single weekend each September.
Outside the US, wings travelled more slowly but just as thoroughly. British pubs picked up "buffalo wings" as a menu staple through the 1990s and 2000s, usually served hotter and less butter-forward than the American original. More recently, the home air fryer boom of the early 2020s, driven partly by lockdown cooking habits, has turned buffalo wings into one of the most-searched air fryer recipes going, since the appliance gets close to deep-fried crispness without a pan of hot oil on the hob.
A classic buffalo sauce is deceptively simple, and that simplicity is exactly why it works. It's built from just two things in roughly equal measure: a vinegar-based cayenne hot sauce and melted butter.
| Element | Role | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Cayenne hot sauce | Heat and acid | Sharp vinegar tang, steady chilli heat that builds rather than spikes |
| Melted butter | Emulsifier and carrier | Mellows the acidity, coats evenly, carries capsaicin's heat across the tongue |
| Fried chicken skin | Texture base | Crisp surface that holds the glaze instead of turning soggy |
| Blue cheese & celery | Contrast | Cold, sharp dairy and crunch to cut the heat and fat |
The fat in the butter is doing real work here, not just adding richness. Capsaicin, the compound responsible for chilli heat, is fat-soluble rather than water-soluble, so butter actually carries the burn further across your palate than a straight vinegar sauce would on its own, while also rounding off the sauce's sharp edges. That's part of why blue cheese, itself high in fat, works so well as a foil: it's cutting the same heat by the same mechanism, just from the other direction.
Getting crisp skin without breading is the other half of the technique. The Anchor Bar's method relied on deep frying at high heat to render the fat under the skin and crisp it in one go, and this recipe's air fryer method is chasing the same result with hot circulating air instead of oil, tossing the wings partway through so every side gets equal exposure.
Once buffalo wings left Buffalo, other American regions developed their own answers to the same idea rather than simply copying it. Nashville hot chicken, which has its own separate and older lineage tracing back to the early 20th century, takes a different route to heat entirely, using a cayenne-laced oil brushed onto fried chicken after cooking rather than a butter-based sauce tossed through it. The two are often lumped together by unfamiliar diners, but they're built on different techniques with different histories.
Korean fried chicken, which gained a strong following in the US through the 2000s and 2010s, brought a double-fry method that produces an even shatteringly crisp skin, typically glazed in a gochujang-based sauce rather than a cayenne one. It's had a real influence on how American wing joints think about texture, even outside explicitly Korean-style menus.
In the UK, "buffalo wings" arrived as pub grub in the 1990s and settled into the culture as a shareable starter rather than a main course centrepiece the way it often is in the US. British versions also tend to skew hotter and less butter-heavy, closer to a straight chilli sauce glaze than the Anchor Bar original.
The most widely credited account points to Teressa Bellissimo at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, on 30 October 1964. A rival claim from restaurateur John Young exists too, and no original receipt or menu has ever surfaced to settle it definitively, though the city of Buffalo formally sided with the Anchor Bar version in 1977.
They're named after the city of Buffalo, New York, where the dish was created, not the animal. There's no buffalo meat involved at any point.
Buffalo wings specifically use the butter-and-cayenne-hot-sauce combination first served at the Anchor Bar. "Hot wings" is a looser, more general term that can cover any spicy wing preparation, including dry rubs or entirely different sauce bases that owe nothing to the original Buffalo formula.
Practicality as much as design. Teressa Bellissimo reportedly used what she had on hand behind the bar that night. It turned out to work perfectly as a foil, since both the cold crunch of celery and the fat in blue cheese cut through the heat and richness of the sauce.