Bovino - Buffalo Everything

To my son Augustus, my wife
Angela, my family, friends, and
the people of Western New York.
Buffalove.

Meglio mur sazzio ca camp dino.

Better to die full than live fasting.

Old Neapolitan proverb that goes double for Buffalo

F irst, wings, yes, but also, Buffalo is a city full of delicious comfort foodthe melting pot of comfort food if you will. Yup. And youre the one missing out if you dont think so. Ive been asked Why Buffalo? more than a few times by perplexed New Yorkers, and friendly and appreciative, if slightly skeptical Nickel City restaurant owners, bartenders, writers, and denizens. (What, waitwings isnt a good enough answer?) I typically get one sentence to answer that question before I lose folks who havent sat down to a perfectly rare beef on weck or a bowl of wings that has taken at least 15 minutes to cook.

Wings have taken the country by storm over the past five decades since they were invented. And yet, because they seem so simple, because theyve become so ubiquitous, and maybe because of perceptions of their middle-class beginnings and their Western New York origins (the Midwestern part of whats arguably the countrys most cosmopolitan state), the artistry behind this beloved bar food and its blue-collar Mecca feel distinctly overlooked. Someone needed to eat all the wings and give this great citys food scene the attention it deserves beyond lip service to Frank and Teressa Bellissimo, as great a story as theirs is. And I was hungry.

The longer answer to Why Buffalo? Pizza.

Pizza is a common response to (and solution for) many of my lifes questions. Im a New Yorker and a pizza guy who has written about the holy trinity of cheese, sauce, and crust in the City and across America for nearly a decade. When I learned years ago about Buffalo-style pizza (not Buffalo chicken pizza, which is another story), a pizza species in my state that I hadnt explored, I considered it a gap in my cred. Id made pilgrimages to some of Americas most storied pizzerias and even visited Old Forge, Pennsylvania, the self-described Pizza Capital of the World, but Id never eaten pizza in one of the most pizza-obsauced parts of my own state?

For shame. Someday, I was going to get to Buffalo and find out what it was all about.

As a food editor and writer, Ive checked off my ever-expanding bucket list many of Americas best restaurants and most iconic food trails: New Mexicos green chile cheeseburgers, San Diegos fish tacos, hot dogs in Chicago and Connecticut, Maines lobster rolls, Texas barbecue, San Antonios puffy tacos. But again, when I thought of the state Im so proud to be from, I found a gaping hole on my list: Buffalo wings. (For the record, theyre just chicken wings or wings in Buffalo.)

This wings and pizza two-fer made Buffalo a huge draw. So when a writer friend put me in touch with her agent who was interested in pitching a Buffalo-sauce cookbook, Id finally found my ticket. Little did I know how much more there was to eat.

As I ate my research, I learned of at least eight other nationally uncelebrated delicious things that are nearly as beloved to locals as wings, even if not quite as iconic. And then there were the bars, the old-school Polish and Italian-American eateries, the Burmese restaurants, and the new-school restaurants tapping into the regions rich agricultural bounty.

So, that Buffalo-sauce cookbook turned into an effort to chronicle Buffalo wing culture beyond its two most famous spots, to seek out its best pizza parlors, celebrate its fish-fries, restaurants, and lesser-known but no less delicious foods, and to share some secrets. All in all, I visited more than 120 restaurants, conducted dozens of interviews with local food icons, and researched and reverse-engineered recipes to replicate the citys tasty foods at home, the latter of which you can find in this books companion volume, The Buffalo Everything Cookbook.

And thats how I fell in love with Buffalo, quickly gained 25 pounds, and learned a great piece of advice for anyone who loves comfort food: if youre someone who hasnt yet shuffled off to Buffalo, take nothing else away from this book than its first sentence, and get yourself to the city ASAP.

We can take it on the chin in this town. We can take it. That New York
grit, we have that too, but its been earned through nature.

Christa Glennie Seychew

Buffalo food writer

To you guys, less is more. To us, more aint enough.

Anthony Kulik

Lovejoy Pizza owner

T o the outsider trying to understand the city, Buffalo can be a series of contrasts and seeming contradictions. It was described by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect behind New Yorks Central Park, as Americas best designed city. A metropolis dotted with Art Deco architecture, Buffalos cityscape was laid out by Joseph Ellicott in 1804. Ellicott was inspired by Pierre LEnfant, the French-American military engineer who designed the basic plan for Washington, DC, after the Baroque system of city planning, which centers on public squares, main streets, and a series of boulevards.

Buffalo is a six-and-a-half hour drive from New York City but just an hour and a half by air. To out-of-staters, it seems like Buffalonians could just take a quick drive to Manhattan for the weekend, but from New Yorkers perspectives, Buffalos that place all the way across the state that may as well be in the Midwest or Canada (you will even occasionally see soda here called pop!). And in fact, New York state is nearly half as wide as Texasfar enough away for Long Island college freshman at SUNY Buffalo State to be conveniently within reach of home while also relatively safe from unexpected parental visits.

Once youre in Buffalo, its a three-hour drive to Cleveland, a little more than four hours to Detroit, and just two to Toronto.

Buffalo is a city that invented a food thats famous across the country and around the world. Paris, Rome, London, Hong Kong, Rionone of them have a food as synonymous with its citys name. To most who havent been, Buffalo is that depressed place where it snows, where the chicken wing was invented, and that has that team that lost four consecutive Super Bowls. Its a city that proudly drinks Labatt Blue, a Canadian beer (okay, a Belgian-owned Canadian beer) and roots for the Buffalo Bisons, the Triple-A affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays, when the Yankees own Triple-A team, the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, comes to town. Is it a Midwestern city populated by Americans who have a dash of Canadian personableness, a pinch of New York City attitude, and a bit of Brooklyn self-boosterism? Nah, its just Buffalo.

Its hard to imagine there was a time, as Calvin Trillin described in his 1980 New Yorker article, when Buffalonians wondered if they could ever profit from exporting their local delicacy to the rest of America. According to the National Chicken Councils annual report, Americans ate 1.33 billion chicken wings in 2017, up 2 percent (30 million wings) over 2016. Wings have been on the menus of major national pizza chains for decades, and wing-centric restaurants have taken flight, among them Hooters, Wingstop, Wing Zone, Atomic Wings, and East Coast Wings & Grill. CHD Expert, a food service market research company that tracks restaurant data, estimates that there are more than 3,200 restaurants in the United States dedicated primarily to chicken wings. And that doesnt include Buffalo Wild Wings (B-Dubs for short, which gets classified as a bar and grill), which serves wings with, at last count, 21 sauces at more than 1,100 restaurants in America, Canada, Mexico, the Middle East, the Philippines, and Panama, and has a goal of expanding to 1,700 restaurants across North America in the next 10 years.