One day, I received some bad news: I was going to be required to travel to Buffalo, New York for work.

Several jobs ago, in 2012, I was traveling frequently between Minneapolis and Chicago. Buffalo was a new destination for me. Someone with information relevant to my job lived there, and we needed to go to him. I knew Buffalo mainly as three things: (1) the place on one side of Niagara Falls; (2) the place with the NFL team that is bad at game-winning field goals; and (3) the place where massive snow drifts and other extreme winter weather routinely lead to life-threatening, emergency situations. Thankfully, this trip took place in August. 

Arriving in Buffalo, I was greeted by ominous gray skies and unrelenting rain. It seemed like a city that time forgot, and reminded me of the Lansing, Michigan area where I grew up.

Hungry and with little to guide us other than word-of-mouth, my co-worker and I happened upon the Anchor Bar, which billed itself as the Home of the Original Buffalo Wing. (It dawned on me, a moron, at that very moment, for the first time in my life, that Buffalo wings are named after the city of Buffalo, and not after an animal.)

As we all know, Buffalo wings are not culinary rocket science. You deep fry some chicken wings. You make a sauce. The sauce contains cayenne pepper – usually it’s Frank’s Red Hot. You add some butter and vinegar, and maybe some other stuff (Worcesterrchire, garlic powder, etc.). You put it on the wings. You dip them in bleu cheese. You have some celery to eat with it. We all know this. But someone had to be the first to do it, and Anchor Bar is the undisputed font of Buffalo wing life. There isn’t even a fight or argument about this one – everyone agrees. It is a historical, axiomatically true fact that Anchor Bar did it first.

We sat down in the pleasantly dimly lit restaurant, with no fanfare, no wait, no pretension or paraphernalia that my very reliable memory can muster. We ordered the original wings and ate them. Our low expectations were far surpassed. In how many other bars, shitty restaurants, airports, and catered gatherings have I eaten Buffalo wings? Too many to count. But the originals did, against all logic, deliver a better experience than I’ve ever had before or since.

“But you haven’t had the Buffalo wings at [Peanuts adult-style mwaaaahh murmur].” Look: you can bring me a better wing, place it front of me, and I will gladly eat it. But I will never again sit in the Anchor Bar in 2012 with my co-worker, sheltered from a cold rain, drinking a beer, and eating that specific wing.

It appears maybe a lot has changed for Anchor Bar in the 12 intervening years since this experience. The inventors of the Buffalo wing are long dead, and their progeny have vanished from this Earth. The owner who took over from that family died in 2018. Anchor Bar has since expanded, added airport kiosks, added international (well okay, Hamilton, Ontario) locations, and in a true death knell to values, opened a location in Round Rock, Texas. I don’t know if the wing today is the same as the wing I ate in 2012. But for a low key destination, and a low key food, I imagine Anchor Bar still delivers.

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