Gourmet is in the mouth of
the eater.
Prepared the correct way, we believe this tasty treat is every bit
as gourmet as macadamia crusted octopus. Some epicureans may not
agree with us.
Toss whatever you’ve heard, here’s the real Scoop De
Jour!
In the late 70’s my partner in the restaurant business ran
across a place in San Diego called "Newts Wings & Things." Now,
you gotta wonder about a place with a name like that and he did.
But, when he tried their Wings, called, oddly, Buffalo Wings, he
had a "Food Epiphany." Now, he doesn’t recall how many orders
he had but his lips burned, his fingers were stained red but he
could not stop eating them.
Ray VanWagner, now on a full-on flavor quest, wanted to, well,
define these tasty chicken morsels, so flavorful that even the
smell of them made his mouth water. But, the proprietor of
Newt’s Wings & Things wouldn’t tell him what the
recipe or sauce he used was. Ray hung around the parking lot,
talked to the cooks as they left work but it was like the Costa
Nostra, nobody’d talk and people started wondering about Ray.
Finally, desperate, he rummaged in their trash dumpster until he
found the empty sauce bottles.
Voilà! There it was, "Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce."
He had the secret. But, there was more. Just how the wings were
cooked and why they were called Buffalo Wings. So, okay, Ray snoops
a little more and discovers that Newts Wings & Things’
owner was, originally, from Buffalo, New York and had copied the
recipe from a restaurant there that had been serving them for
years, thus the name, "Buffalo Wings." (Ray figured out that
connection without a private investigator’s license!)
Ray began serving them at his Mission Beach house around the
same time another restaurant operator on the west coast, Frank
Colangelo, originally from Buffalo, began serving them at his
restaurant in San Diego, having also copied the recipe from the
same Buffalo restaurant. The Buffalo Wing Phenomenon was now
Bi-Coastal---the plot thickens, eh?
But that’s really the end of the story. Here’s the
beginning. The heat of the 60’s, 1964, corner of Main &
North Streets, Buffalo, New York, Anchor Bar. Donnie Bellissimo,
son of bar owners, Frank & Teressa, blows in with a bunch of
friends, hungry. "Mom? How about somthin’ to eat?" he
says.
The bar served chicken dinners but trimmed the wings for
customers so Teressa always had a bushel full of the damned things.
So, she fills a fryer basket with a bunch, gets them crispy, covers
them with some sauce she found on the shelf and there it was!
Buffalo Wings. As she carried the tray with them through the
restaurant, the aroma wafted across the tables and customers
started ordering "what that guy ordered," right then and there!
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Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce was the stuff Teressa used
but, over the past 35 years, the company was bought and sold
several times and, unfortunately, the sauce formula changed. Though
the sauce is now commonly available in the condiments section of
many grocery stores (near the Tabasco Sauce), Ivano Toscanni,
Anchor Bar’s executive chef/manager, pictured here at the
Anchor, for the past 30 years, reports that it isn’t legit
anymore, though. Not a problem, since now, Anchor Bar puts out the
original recipe and, wouldn’t you know it, its available thru
our Oak Hill
Springs Country Store. |
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