The Anchor Bar fries leftover wings in 1964 — a throwaway cut becomes billions

Chicken wings were close to worthless: a butcher's byproduct sold off for stock, which is why the Anchor Bar, a Buffalo, New York neighborhood bar Frank and Teressa Bellissimo bought in 1939, could build a whole late-night dish around them.

Deep-fry the wing the trade threw away — split, unbreaded — drown it in cayenne-butter hot sauce, serve with the blue cheese and celery already in the fridge.

In 1964 Teressa Bellissimo split the wings, fried them without breading and coated them in a vinegar-cayenne hot sauce cut with melted butter, with blue cheese dressing and celery sticks alongside. Versions differ on the exact moment — her son Dominic's hungry friends, a Friday meatless-crowd improvisation — but the dish clicked and became a menu staple.

The near-worthless cut became a segment worth billions a year: by 2013 the US had roughly 1,500 wing franchises growing 11% a year, four times the franchising norm; Buffalo declared Chicken Wing Day in 1977; by 2012 Americans ate 1.25 billion wing portions over a single Super Bowl weekend.

Through the 1950s, chicken wings were what happened to a chicken after the valuable parts left: a cheap byproduct sold for stock or discarded. In 1964, at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, Teressa Bellissimo turned that trash cut into a signature dish — wings split at the joint, fried unbreaded until crisp, then tossed in her own sauce of vinegar-based cayenne hot sauce mellowed with melted butter, served with blue cheese dressing and celery sticks that happened to be in the kitchen.

The dish spread slowly at first — a 1969 profile of the bar didn't even mention it, and a 1980 New Yorker piece found New Yorkers could not buy wings anywhere else. Buffalo's mayor settled the origin question by proclamation in 1977, naming the Bellissimos the inventors and July 29 Chicken Wing Day; rivals, notably John Young's Wings 'n Things, which served its own breaded whole-wing version, have disputed the credit ever since.

Then the economics took over. Because wings started cheap, a snack built on them carried huge margins, and the format was effortless to copy. Duff's and chain after chain scaled it; by 2013 the US had about 1,500 wing franchises, growing around 11% a year — nearly four times the rate of franchised restaurants overall. In 2012 the National Chicken Council counted 1.25 billion wing portions eaten over one Super Bowl weekend: a throwaway cut had become one of the most valuable pieces of the bird.

The key input cost was close to zero: wings were a byproduct the meat trade had to move, so early margins on the dish were enormous.

The format was deliberately hand-friendly — wings split in half, no breading, dip on the side — which made it a bar food people could eat while drinking.

The sauce recipe was simple enough for any kitchen to replicate, so every bar that added wings was marketing the category for free.

Tying the dish to sports-watching occasions gave it a recurring, calendar-driven demand spike that chains could plan whole businesses around.

Value hides in the discard pile. A near-zero-cost cut plus a format anyone can copy is a category starter kit — the grind is turning a bar snack into a national default.

The Anchor Bar still sells the wings and lives off the invention; Buffalo leans on it as civic identity, with Chicken Wing Day every July 29. The credit fight never fully ended — food writers still weigh John Young's claim alongside the Bellissimos' — but commercially it hardly matters: the unbreaded, hot-sauced, blue-cheese-with-celery format is the standard, and the wing the industry once gave away now regularly sells for more per pound than the breast.