It began as garbage
That is not a figure of speech. For most of American culinary history the chicken wing was a throwaway part, the thing you simmered for stock along with the backs and the necks because there was almost no meat on it and nobody would pay for it. Butchers sold them by the sack for pennies, or gave them away. The entire dish exists because somebody looked at the cheapest part of the bird and decided it was worth cooking properly.
Which is my favourite kind of food story, and it is the same story as the oyster, the lobster and the short rib. Everything wonderful was once cheap.
The Anchor Bar, and three stories that cannot all be true
The official version puts the invention at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, in 1964, at the hands of Teressa Bellissimo, who ran the kitchen with her husband Frank. She fried some wings, split them at the joint, tossed them in a cayenne and butter sauce, and sent them out with celery and blue cheese because that is what was in the walk-in.
The trouble starts when you ask why she did it, because the family told three different stories over the years.
Version one: her son Dominic came in late with hungry friends and she improvised a snack.
Version two: a group of Catholic regulars were waiting out Friday midnight so they could eat meat again, and she wanted something ready at twelve.
Version three: a delivery arrived containing wings instead of the backs and necks she had ordered for the spaghetti sauce, and rather than waste them she cooked them.
Each version has been told by a Bellissimo, in print, as the true one. I do not think this is dishonesty so much as what happens to any family anecdote after twenty years and a hundred retellings. But it is a reminder that the tidiest food origin stories are usually the least reliable.
Three versions of one night, all from the same family, all told as fact. That is not a conspiracy. That is just what memory does.
The other man, and the sauce from Washington
Here is the part of the story that took decades to get told properly.
Around the same time, John Young was selling chicken wings a few streets away at a place called Wings 'n Things. Young was a Black restaurateur, his licence dates to 1966, and he claimed he had been moving thousands of pounds of wings before that and had sold the recipe before he ever filed the paperwork. He also said, pointedly, that Frank Bellissimo used to eat in his restaurant.
Young's wings were different in an important way. He served them whole and breaded, not split at the joint and naked, and he sauced them with his own version of mumbo sauce, which is a sweet, tangy, tomato-and-vinegar condiment out of Washington DC, not a cayenne hot sauce. So the two men were not making the same dish. Anchor Bar's version, split and unbreaded and hot, is the one that became the buffalo wing as everyone now understands it.
But Young was unquestionably selling chicken wings as a destination dish in Buffalo at the same moment, and for most of sixty years he was left out of the story entirely. The honest conclusion is the one historians have now settled on: the buffalo wing was not invented by a person. It was arrived at, in one city, by more than one kitchen, because the same cheap ingredient was sitting in front of all of them.
Two footnotes that improve the story
The wing predates all of them. A Buffalo hotel menu from 1857 lists "Chicken Wings, fried." So even the city's own claim to have thought of cooking a wing is more than a century older than the bar that made it famous.
It was made official in 1977. On 29 July that year the mayor of Buffalo, Stan Makowski, proclaimed Chicken Wing Day, on the grounds that the city was eating thousands of pounds of them every week. It is now observed nationally, which is a rare case of a municipal proclamation actually sticking.
What makes a wing good
Before the list, the four things that separate a great wing from the sad orange ones at the airport bar.
Fresh, never frozen. A frozen wing releases water in the fryer, and water is the enemy of crisp skin. This single choice explains most of the gap between the best places and the rest, and it is why the great wing rooms will tell you about it unprompted.
Skin that shatters. The texture you want is thin and brittle, not thick and battered. Most of the best American wings are fried naked, no breading at all, sometimes with a light dusting of starch. The crunch should come from rendered skin, not from a coating.
Sauce applied, not drowned. Bar-Bill in East Aurora famously brushes the sauce on. That sounds like a fussy detail and it is the whole game, because a wing sitting in a bowl of sauce is a soggy wing within four minutes.
And blue cheese, not ranch. I will take the argument. Buffalo sauce is fat, acid and heat, and blue cheese answers all three while ranch only answers the first. Ranch is a fine dip for a different food.
The ten best, and no chains
One ground rule, which you set and I agree with: no chains. That rule costs this list its most famous name. The Anchor Bar now has around eighteen locations across several states and Canada and actively sells franchises, which makes it a chain by any honest definition. Go once, for the history, the way you would visit a monument. Then eat somewhere on this list.
| Restaurant | Why it made the list | Style | What to order | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Bar-Bill TavernEast Aurora, New York | The consensus best wing in America, and it is not particularly close. Fresh wings, never frozen, fried to a genuinely shattering skin, and the sauce brushed on by hand rather than tossed, so the last wing in the basket is as crisp as the first. A 150-year-old building on Main Street with beef on weck on the menu since long before the wings. | Buffalo, split, sauce brushed | Medium hot, and the beef on weck |
| 02 | Gabriel’s Gate145 Allen St, Buffalo | The Buffalo room everyone local sends you to once you have done the tourist stop. An 1860s townhouse with a fireplace and a stuffed elk, serving the platonic Buffalo wing: big, meaty, properly crisp, hot sauce that tastes of cayenne rather than vinegar, and a blue cheese made in house. Unchanged, deliberately. | Classic Buffalo | Hot, blue cheese, extra celery |
| 03 | San Tung1031 Irving St, San Francisco | The most influential non-Buffalo wing in the country. Dry-fried, dusted in starch, then tossed in a garlic, ginger and chilli glaze that reduces to something closer to caramel than sauce. The queue runs an hour or two and has done for years, which tells you everything. | Chinese dry-fried | Dry fried chicken wings, obviously |
| 04 | The Local758 Ponce de Leon Ave NE, AtlantaNo website | Atlanta invented lemon pepper wet, and this is the neighbourhood bar that does it better than the famous places. Smoked first, then fried, so there is real depth under the pepper. The buffalo jerk is the other reason to come. | Smoked then fried, lemon pepper | Lemon pepper wet |
| 05 | Crisp2940 N Broadway, Chicago | The Korean answer, and the best argument that buffalo is not the only correct sauce. Jumbo wings double fried to a lacquered crackle and coated in Seoul Sassy, a soy, garlic and ginger glaze that is sweet, salty and faintly hot all at once. Juicy inside in a way most wings are not. | Korean double-fried | Seoul Sassy, whole wings |
| 06 | DCity Smokehouse203 Florida Ave NW, Washington DC | The historical full circle, in the city mumbo sauce actually comes from and whose condiment ended up in John Young’s Buffalo kitchen. Pit-smoked wings under a house rub, sauces served on the side rather than tossed through. Crackly skin, deep smoke, no drowning. | Smoked, sauce on the side | Pit smoked wings, sauces on the side |
| 07 | Stiles Switch BBQ & Brew6610 N Lamar Blvd, Austin | What happens when a serious Central Texas pit takes wings seriously. Smoked over oak until the fat renders, then flash-fried so the skin tightens, then sauced. The smoke is not a garnish here, it goes all the way through the meat. | Oak-smoked then flash-fried | Alabama white sauce |
| 08 | Byrne’s TavernKensington, PhiladelphiaNo website | A corner bar going since 1978 that makes exactly one kind of wing, buffalo, with a house sauce, and makes it properly. No flavour menu, no thirty sauces, no boneless. On Super Bowl Sunday they move thousands. The purest version of the form on this list. | Classic buffalo, one way | Hot, and a lager |
| 09 | Tâm Tâm99 NW 1st St, Miami | A Michelin Bib Gourmand Vietnamese drinking-food and wine bar, and the most purely enjoyable wing in America right now. Fried hard, then glazed in a fish sauce caramel and buried under fried garlic. Salty, sweet, funky and genuinely messy. The bathroom doubles as a karaoke room, which tells you the spirit of the place. | Vietnamese fish sauce caramel | Fish sauce wings, and a beer |
| 10 | Shlap Muan2150 E South St, Long Beach | Cambodian wings, and the most original cooking of anywhere here. Orange habanero, soy caramel with dried chillies, and a house seasoning they call Cambodian Dirt that goes on the dry ones. A family operation with a second room in Monrovia and nothing else in the country quite like it. | Cambodian, dry and wet | Cambodian Dirt, then the Dirty Elvis |
Ranked on the wing itself, not on the room, the beer list or the history. Every entry is independently owned and single-location, or close enough that no one would call it a chain. Byrne’s Tavern and The Local have no websites, which is entirely in character for both, so their addresses are given instead.
Very nearly on the list
Nine-Eleven Tavern in Buffalo, a genuine South Buffalo dive whose wings are as good as anything in the city, kept off only because putting three Buffalo entries in a national ten felt like cheating.
Blackbird’s in Astoria, Queens, which has the best sauce-to-wing ratio in New York City and a heat scale that goes somewhere it should not.
Gatlin’s BBQ in Houston for smoked wings with a sticky Thai chilli glaze, and Vindicktive Wings in Seattle, whose skin genuinely does come out like a potato chip and who will only give you blue cheese, never ranch, which I respect enormously.
Candlelight Inn in Scarsdale, New York, for the hot teriyaki ordered extra wet and extra sloppy, which is the correct way and also a warning.
How to eat them
Order more than you think. A pound is roughly ten wings and it is not enough for two people who like wings.
Eat the flat before the drum. The flat has two bones, more skin per bite, and it goes cold and rubbery faster, so it should be eaten while the skin is still at its best. The drum forgives you.
Do not use a fork. There is no version of this where a fork helps.
And take the celery seriously. It is not garnish. It is a palate reset between heat levels, and a place that gives you tired celery is telling you something about the rest of the kitchen.
Sixty years from a sack of scrap parts to a dish with its own national day and a genuine historical controversy. There are worse things to build a city’s reputation on, and almost nothing that goes better with a cold beer.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.