Great Writing Is Like Inventing Buffalo Wings

Combine some favorites with a dash of creativity and wow the public

Americans eat more than 28 billion chicken wings per year, including more than 1.4 billion on Super Bowl Sunday, but they’re still a fairly new invention.

The secret is in the sauces. The newness of these flavorful food inventions (and every variation of sauces that turn ordinary chicken into Buffalo wings) keeps wing demand “hot.”

During the 2020 Pandemic, combined U.S. sales to restaurants and supermarkets jumped10.3 percent to more than $3 billion while sales of frozen wings leaped 37 percent.

The gritty Buffalo, NY story adds to the appeal. Most credit the invention of Buffalo wings to Teressa Bellissimo, who founded the Anchor Bar in 1935 with her husband, Frank.

Great Inventions, Brands (and Writing) Starts With an Original Idea

Your sauce gives something ordinary its sizzle. Like all good stories, there are variations, but the most popular version explaining the making of the masterpiece known as Buffalo wings goes like this:

Teressa Bellissimo’s son, Dominic, was tending bar one Friday night in March 1964 when his buddies came “home” from college. They were hungry, looking for a snack, and it was long past dinner time. What did Mrs. Bellissimo have?

Terressa began looking through her kitchen, trying to find something she could stir up. She found several chicken wings. In those days, believe it or not, few people ate chicken wings.

Chicken wings were often thrown out or used as “stock” for soup and other meals. She cut the wings into smaller pieces (the look of modern wings). Then Teressa fried the wings, looked around, and covered them with a red spicy sauce that included cayenne pepper, garlic, vinegar, and butter. She added celery and bleu cheese on the side.

The boys loved them. Soon after, her “new invention” was added to the menu, and initially, they were given out as a sort of “free sample” for customers waiting for their orders. Word spread.

Slowly through the 1970s, other restaurants (including Hooters and Wings ‘n Curls) copied the idea, and it really picked up in the 1980s.

I myself discovered Buffalo wings in 1987 when our newspaper crew at The Sun News happened upon Fat Jacks, a Myrtle Beach, South wing place started by a Buffalo, New York native. It became our “hang-out” for wings and beverages.

In the early days, guys from Buffalo could come to a town and “wow” people with this exotic food, throwing the wings into buckets, adding to their appeal as a “finger food’’ you could grab and gobble. By the early 1990s, the big pizza chains (and several local outlets) started offering Buffalo wings as appetizers.

Americans, addicted to productivity, felt like we were actually accomplishing something as we stacked up piles of bitten-up Buffalo bones in the bone buckets.

Today, Buffalo wings are considered an American classic and a staple beloved food like hot dogs, hamburgers, nachos, and pizza. The Anchor Bar has franchised locations spreading the “original” restaurant. Buffalo Wild Wings, the “big” wings chain, sells a couple of billion wings per year.

When the National Buffalo Wing Hall of Flame was launched in 2006, Frank and Teressa Bellissimo were the first inductees with their Anchor Bar. When Teressa died in 1985, her achievement as the inventor of Buffalo wings got her obituary in The New York Times.

A rival claim to being “inventor” of Buffalo wings comes from another Buffalo restaurant owner, the late John Young, who called himself “the king of wings.” He made a different wing starting in the early 1960s (an entire actual wing, not chopped into the finger food, smaller pieces with a different sauce).

His John Young’s Wings “n” Things used the full wing of a chicken, breaded and fried it, covering it with his “Mambo Sauce” that included ketchup and vinegar. The competition adds to the story’s interest, further building wings like a true brand.

How Great Writing and All True Brands Are Like Buffalo Wings

Every weekend my bride spends hours “inventing” new meals she hasn’t tried before. She seems like a mad scientist (or a writer), researching through books and the internet, walking around trying new ideas and formulas.

It’s not unlike the process writers follow trying to come up with something original, a new masterpiece that will stand out in a crowd of “sameness.”

While planning our last holiday gathering, she dreaded doing the same old thing.

She put together an amazing pork tenderloin with veal sausage and capicola; all rolled into a puff pastry stuffed with fresh mozzarella sundried tomatoes, capers, and olives. The family looked at this original and knew this was something they’d never seen before.

Like those boys eating the first Buffalo wings in 1964, the family gobbled up the new dinner and said, “wow.”

“Normal” writing is like ham and scalloped potatoes at an Easter dinner or turkey on Thanksgiving or a sheet cake on someone’s birthday or the “first baby of the New Year” story in a newspaper. It’s all good but also expected.

Typical writing is scanned over rather than read closely the way people eat “normal” food, gobbling it down and forgetting whether they ate a few hours later.

But when someone comes up with something new (that’s good), people notice no matter what the field.

Innovation and creativity involve many attempts that don’t quite work (like weird uses of Peeps, pretzels, or pineapples that make diners gag).

Thus someone comes up with something amazing, like combining chocolate and peanut butter to “invent” the Reese’s Peanutbutter Cup or combining macaroni and cheese with Buffalo wing sauce to “invent” Buffalo Mac and Cheese.

And that’s how you get your people to say, “Wow. That was amazing.”

Thank you for reading.

If you want to read more of my writings, you may check out the following articles.

• Love and Truth: You Can’t Have One Without the Other
• When You Don’t Have a Reason to Get Out of Bed Every Day
• The Secret of Community: Mastering the Potluck Dinner Strategy

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