Sometime between the Super Bowl kickoff and Bruno Mars suffering a halftime-show wardrobe malfunction, the average American will have spent at least a portion of the big game chowing down on chicken wings.
After a yearlong “chicken drought,” when a feed shortage kept the poultry population down, 2014 is shaping up to be a better year for the bird. And the timing couldn’t be better: This year marks the 50th anniversary of when Teressa Bellissimo decided to fry up and serve some discarded wings — instead of putting them in a soup — late one Friday night at Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY. She supposedly fried the wings in butter, coated them with hot sauce and served them with a side of blue cheese dressing and celery — and a legend was born. Today, mail orders for Anchor’s 50-wing bucket come from as far as Alaska, according to manager Ivano Toscani, who’s worked there for 40 years.
“We’ve got people from New York, LA, Las Vegas,” he says. “People call us — we send it.” He says the business is evenly split between shipped and to-go orders and people who dine in.
But like any great invention, there’s a dispute as to who actually came up with the tasty creation — even among the Bellissimo family, whose accounts vary slightly.
Writer Calvin Trillin named another Buffalo restaurateur, John Young (who died in 1998), as a possible claimant to the title: Young covered the wings served at his spot with a special “mambo sauce” sometime in the 1960s.
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the snack was a local Buffalo treat until a Tampa Hooters put them on the menu during the 1984 Super Bowl. The bird reached critical mass in the early 1990s, when McDonald’s and KFC added Buffalo wings — and people gobbled them up.
Here are a few fun facts every hard-core fan of Buffalo wings needs to know:
Buffalo’s Anchor Bar sells about 2,000 pounds of chicken wings per day, according to manager Ivano Toscani. (During the Super Bowl, the bar sells about 4,000 pounds.)
Anchor Bar’s wings were originally a free bar snack, akin to complimentary pretzels or popcorn — until customers stopped ordering other food. Today, a bucket of 50 wings sells for $41.
Journalist and filmmaker Matt Reynolds spent 16 days sampling 270 different wings in search of the world’s best — which is the subject of his new documentary, “The Great Chicken Wing Hunt.”
1.25 billion the number of wings expected to be consumed on Super Bowl Sunday, according to the National Chicken Council — up 20 million from last year — which would stretch from Seattle’s CenturyLink Field to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ, 30 times over.
More than half of all Americans prefer ranch dressing to blue cheese (32 percent) for dipping their wings, according to an online poll conducted in January by Harris Interactive for the National Chicken Council.
Frank’s RedHot was original Anchor Bar owner Teressa Bellissimo’s first hot sauce of choice, but the restaurant has since come up with its own recipe. The formula is top secret, but ingredients are said to include cayenne peppers, distilled vinegar, water, liquid margarine, salt, spices and garlic.
Columbia, SC, has the highest rate of chicken wing consumption of any city in the US: A Columbia resident is 56 percent more likely to be a chicken wing eater than the average American.
In 2012, at the Wing Bowl 20 in Philadelphia, competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi smashed the world record by eating 337 wings in half an hour.