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Hot, Messy, Sticky: Indy’s Love of Chicken Wings

Paying tribute to everyone’s favorite bar food

By Laura McPhee  //  [email protected]

If you’re ever curious enough to google “when did chicken wings become a thing?” you will be flooded with responses that all contain the same story.

According to the collective wisdom of the internet, the first plate of wings was served in 1964 at a family-owned establishment in Buffalo, New York called the Anchor Bar. The wings were the brainchild of co-owner Teressa Bellissimo, who covered them in her own special cocktail sauce and served them with a side of bleu cheese and celery to her son and his friends one night because that’s what she had available.

Turns out, there had been a delivery mistake. Instead of the chicken backs and necks, she’d ordered for her spaghetti sauce, she got wings. Making the best out of the mix-up, she coated them in sauce and served them up as hors-d'oeuvres.

According to the National Chicken Council, the guys at the bar liked them so much that Teressa put them on the menu the next day. Seemingly overnight, “Buffalo Wings” was an instant hit. Restaurants and bars all over the city started doing the same and within a few years, the local delicacy was growing in popularity around the country.

There was even an official proclamation from the City of Buffalo declaring July 29, 1977, Chicken Wing Day, though by then Mr. Bellissimo seems to be taking all of the credit: “whereas, the success of Mr. Bellissimo’s tasty experiment in 1964 has grown to the point where thousands of pounds of chicken wings are consumed by Buffalonians in restaurants and taverns throughout our city each week. . .”

The concept of a spicy chicken wing hit the big time in 1990 when McDonald’s began selling them. KFC rolled out Hot Wings a year later, and Domino’s Pizza in 1994.  Not long after, the NFL’s Super Bowl turned into a mega-event and wings were back in a very big way.

It helps that chicken wings are ridiculously cheap to buy and serve. Bars figured out pretty quickly that “all you can eat” wings—especially the very spicy ones—would lead to increased beer purchases. Turn on an hours-long football game, and the bar tab more than makes up for whatever those wings cost you.

Unfortunately, the story of the Bellissimo family bar being the origin of the chicken wing craze can be pretty easily debunked for the more vigorous of researchers.

For one thing, there’s was another resident of Buffalo who was cooking up spicy wings and selling them like hotcakes before Mrs. Bellissimo served them to her customers. From the moment she started getting press, this gentleman was out there trying to set the record straight.

John Young’s Wings-n-Things was selling wings first, said John Young from day one. And, at the time, he had documentation to prove it. While preparation methods of the two wing dishes were different, the Anchor Bar’s wings were chopped, fried and dipped in bleu cheese dressing, while Young’s wings were whole, breaded then dipped in his mambo sauce, the concept was pretty much the same.

Maybe it’s because Young was Black and Bellissimo was White that her version of events seems to be the one most remembered now by google searches and historians alike. It’s a theory Calvin Trillin found plausible when he tried to find out the origin of the chicken wing for a 1980 New Yorker piece.

“Was the Buffalo chicken wing invented when Teressa Bellissimo thought of splitting it in half and deep-frying it and serving it with celery and bleu-cheese dressing?” writes Trillin. “Or was it invented when John Young started using mambo sauce and thought of elevating wings into a specialty? How about the Black people who have always eaten chicken wings?”

Yeah. How ‘bout the fact that people, especially in the South, especially people of color in the South, have been eating chicken wings since way before 1964?

An indy wings history

Even in Indianapolis, you could find chicken wings on the menu of bars and restaurants at least 50 years prior to the Anchor Bar in Buffalo.

In 1910, Smith’s Cafe at 39 N. Illinois St. was advertising a lunch special of Creole Chicken Wings, while a few blocks away on Meridian Street the Budweiser Cafe was competing with Southern Wings and Giblets in Gravy.

Heck, by 1935 Emily Post was answering desperate pleas from hostesses wondering how best to serve messy, sticky chicken wings and whether they should be eaten with a fork or with your hands (answer: a fork, unless you are at home then fingers are okay).

In 1960, The Indianapolis Star ran a recipe for “Cocktail Wings” that sounds suspiciously like whatever it was Teressa Bellissimo served up a few years later. Here, the recipe calls for wings batter-dipped, rolled in crumbs and then deep-fried; served with a “tangy dipping sauce” made up of chili sauce, catsup, horseradish, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice.

The best example of Indy’s chicken wing history, however, comes in 1969. On the night the old Claypool Hotel downtown was being demolished, a “Destruction Ball” was held in the lobby. Guest were entertained by a band and offered champagne, beer and chicken wings for refreshments. At midnight, they were hustled across the street, large exterior floodlights were turned on, and they cheered as a demolition crew brought down the building.

It’s hard to say if any tailgate party in the vicinity can rival that night, but Indianapolis hasn’t lost its passion for wings in the decades since. If anything, they are ubiquitous at this point.  

Without a way to determine the “first” to serve the coveted chicken wing, perhaps it’s best if we simply focus on who is serving the best plate of them today.

NIXED COVER SHOOT