BUFFALO

Famed for its eponymous wings, New York State’s second-biggest city is finding a new audience for its home-spun fast food. And there’s a distinctly local feel to the city’s take on Americana food culture.

- Neil Davey

To my left, there are people diving face first into a paddling pool of blue cheese sauce. To my right, there are girls on stage explaining why they deserve to be crowned Miss Buffalo Wing 2019. And, surrounding me, in the temporarily repurposed Sahlen Field baseball stadium, there are tens of thousands of people preparing chicken wings, serving chicken wings, queuing for chicken wings, eating chicken wings and talking chicken wings. Frankly, Bill Murray has a lot to answer for.

Yes. Bill Murray; that Bill Murray. There are many places that are big on food tourism — Venice, Bangkok, Tokyo, Padstow — but few lend their name to one of the world’s most popular dishes. Buffalo, New York is the home of the Buffalo chicken wing, and the brilliant chaos that owes its invention to Bill Murray is the National Buffalo Wing Festival.

“There was a movie back in 2001 called Osmosis Jones,” festival founder Drew ‘The Wing King’ Cerza tells me. “Bill Murray’s character was a big junk food eater who loved chicken wings and was travelling to the Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo. But, in 2001, Buffalo didn’t have a festival dedicated to chicken wings. Our local paper wrote an article that all these wings around the world are branded with the name of our city, why don’t we have a festival? I was a food promoter at the time and one thing led to another and here we are.”