An Aussie Discovers American Wings

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habie with our American Stories, and we
tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story.
Send them to our American Stories dot com. That's our
American Stories dot Com. Our next story is a story
from a listener from Australia, of all places, and how
he came to fall in love with the food that
is uniquely American, the Buffalo Wing.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
My name's Colin Bettles.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
I'm fifty years old and currently I live in Sydney, Australia,
which is on the other side of the country, about
four thousand kilometers or two and a half thousand miles
away from where I grew up in Perth. At age
twenty in nineteen ninety I set off from Perth before
a working holiday in the United Kingdom. I found my

(00:56):
way to be working in a bar in the London
suburb of Kensington, where I worked in between playing cricket
for the London Theaters Cricket Club, among others. And in
that bar we mingled with students from all over the
world and we gained a different tuition on each other's
worlds over a few beverages at the bar, of.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Course, and.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
During this time I made some very good friends so
I didn't have any great conviction about where I was
going to travel to while I was on my working holiday,
and so I decided to go to the US and
visit some of these friends that I'd made while working
in the bar. And my first stop was to stay
with a guy named James, who I'd met who was

(01:40):
attending a place called Colgate University in a small college
town called Hamilton in upstate New York. James lived across
the road from a place called the Old Pizza Pub.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
My very first night that I stayed.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
They treated me to a buffalo wings from there, and
I'd never had them before in my life. In fact,
i'd never even heard of them before, and they didn't
have to do much to convince me to try them,
and as they say, it was love at first bite.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
I was hooked on this new taste sensation straight away.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
What I remember most about that first time experience was
the tenderness of the chicken that fell off the bone.
It didn't require or virtually required no chewing of the
chicken meat, and of course the tangy hot flavor sensation
that exploded in my mouth and the blue cheese dip.
Always remember just how smooth and creamy that was, and

(02:37):
how it complimented the hotness of the wings and enhanced
the flavor. And basically that's where my love affair with
buffalo wings started and it continues to this day. My
most memorable experience with a wing well, as they say.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
There's nothing like the first time.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
So I think that first night with James and his
buddies eating wings for the first time at the Farmhouse
remains my greatest and most lasting memory.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
But I also have another strong memory.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
That always brings a smile to my face, and that's
actually an evening spent out with some of those Colgate
Uni friends James and Jeff, Charles and frant in New
York City in nineteen ninety two for my twenty second birthday,
and we stumbled upon a place by accident. I can't
recall its name. In fact, there's quite a bit about
the evening I can't recall, but this was a typical

(03:30):
New York City dive bar.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
While it was a dive bar, the upside.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Was that they served these wings, and these wings were
ranked on a scaral according to their degree of hotness
let's call it the chili factor, and the serving at
the top of this heat list was called the Chernobyl wing,
and it was a huge sized wing and they only
allowed them to be served one at a time. Now,

(03:56):
this serving restriction, I may guess, was a requirement that
was applied to the bar by the local fire department
or a nearby health facility. Now common sense would tell
you to avoid this sort of danger, but as they say,
making mistakes all just part of growing up and down
they went. It seemed like a fun idea at the
time to dare each other to eat these ferociously hot

(04:19):
wings that had more punch than the closing scenes of
a rocky movie, and to wash them down with one
or two polite beverages. But we definitely had a few
regrets the next morning, and they lingered long into the
next afternoon.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
Have I ever met a wing I don't like? Well,
the answer is yes.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
One of my pet hats is when the wings are
served whole and they haven't been cut up into flats
and drum pieces, and the tips haven't been cut off
and thrown away. This tells me that there's a lazy
and unsophisticated method behind these wings. That they've probably been
pre cooked and frozen, which means that the flavor is
substandard and pretty black.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
And really this is generally backed.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
Up by serving ranch sauce with the wings rather than
authentic blue cheese dip or lord for Bit mayonnaise or
Aoli sauce. Wings that are heavily baking breadcrumbs are also
just poor substitutes for the real thing. And call me
a wing snob if you like. But if they're not authentic,
and if they're not genuine, and if they're not the

(05:23):
real deal and made with a bit of love and
a bit of time and care, then you're better off
doing your taste buds a favor and going without. Is
there an American food? And do I think that food
is the Buffalo Wing? Well, the answer is quite simply yes.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Some people might look at the hot dog.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
And the deep pan pizza in Chicago, but at the
end of the day, they're just hybrids and they don't
compare to the Buffalo wing, which was born and raised
in the USA. The backstory to how the wing was
invented on that famous Friday night at the Anchor Bar
in nineteen sixty four. That this great dish is purely
American as it originated at the Anchor Bar didn't originate

(06:05):
in Germany or Italy or even Australia. It was in
Upstate New York at the Anchor Bar. And it goes
a bit like this that Dominic Belosimo was tending bar
late that evening and a group of his friends arrived
with a big appetite, and he asked his mother, Theresa,
to prepare something for his friends to eat. Now, she
had some chicken wings, which were normally preserved for soup

(06:28):
in the kitchen at the Anchor Bar, and she deep
fried them and flavored them with a secret sauce, and
of course they became an instant hit and regular on
the menu, not just at the Anchor Bar, but all
over the US and throughout the world, and even in
Australia now they are very popular and becoming more and
more popular.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
And you've been listening to Colin Bettles, and he's from Australia.
He listens to our show in Australia too. And by
the way, America imports so many fine things around the world,
our ingenuity in every endeavor, including of course food. When
we come back more with Colin Bettles here on our
American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell

(07:31):
about this great country, and especially the stories of America's
rich past. Know that all of our stories about American history,
from war to politics, to innovation, culture and faith, are
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(07:52):
will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.
Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we
returned to our American stories and to an Australian listener

(08:13):
of this show, Colin Battles the story of the buffalo
wing and of course this Australian's obsession with it. In
the early nineties, Colin headed back to London from his
trip to America and started work back at the Builder's
Arms Bar in Kensington. Let's pick up the story from there.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
Now, after my first trip to US, I returned to
live in London, and I still had a strong craving
for buffalo wings, but there was no wing seen in
London in the hitly nineteen nineties, and so it was
a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack,
and I had to go without, which of course wasn't easy,
and I hadn't thought of the idea at that stage

(08:56):
of cooking them myself. Anyway, After a period of time,
a couple of my fellow bartenders and workmates at the
Builders Arms, Tim who is from New Zealand, and Declan
and Patrick believe it or not, who are from Ireland.
They'd learned about a US style bar and restaurant called
TGI Fridays opening in Covent Garden and they duly informed

(09:16):
me that Tgi's served wings. This was a major breakthrough
in my life at that age, and this new TGI
Fridays became a regular haunt for me, and I'd often
drag Tim and Declan and Patrick along there and anyone
else who wanted to join me in a wing fest.
They weren't the best wings I've ever had at Tgi's,

(09:36):
but they were certainly good and they certainly satisfied my appetite,
and I'd often dine by myself with Tgi's just to
get a plate of wings. Now, about the age of
twenty four, not that long after returning from living overseas
in London, I decided to go into business for myself
and I bought a fish and chip shop. Now, this

(09:59):
youthful stab it capitalism was underscored by, of course, placing
buffalo wings on the menu at North Beach Seafoods, And
this kept my wing dream.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Slightly alive, shall we say, but in a modest way.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
It was just great to be serving wings at my
own business, even if it was a fish and chip shop. Now,
one of the things that happened at that time was
my marketing for the buffalo wings included a having a
dedicated advertising board that my mate Benny Morgan did for me,
and he was a sign writer, and on that advertising
board he drew a picture of a buffalo with the price,

(10:33):
which I'd say was probably about five dollars for a
serve of twelve wings with blue cheese dip.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Customers would often come me to the shop and look
at the.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
Sign and go, oh, I didn't know buffaloes had wings anyway,
then obviously I would just be able to give them
an education on buffalo wings and they would put a
hand in their.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Pocket and buy some.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
Hopefully these chicken wings, though they weren't cooked in corn
or peanut oil. Let's just say there was a slight
oceanic texture to the final flavor. And the chicken meat
also had to be frozen because there wasn't a large
number of orders on a daily basis, so I had
to defrost the chicken first, and this meant that took

(11:13):
a lot longer to cook the orders, about forty minutes,
so we lost sales.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
But this didn't put everyone off buying.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
Them, and we had some good loyal customers who got
into the habit of phoning there were orders ahead, which
is what you do with a fish and chip shop anyway,
and so trying to train them up to buy buffalo
wings and getting.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Used to the slight delay.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
While I was never going to retire on buffalo wings
alone from the fish and chip shop, it was certainly
a great experience, and I can always say that I
came home and I tried to follow through on my
buffalo wing dream, and I did sell them to Australians
for a while.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
I sold the shop after a couple of years, and
I went to university where I studied theater and drama
and English and comparative literature and creative writing. Eventually I
got into a career in rural and political journalism, which
included working in the Canberra Press Gallery for several years. Now,
the reason why it's probably important to talk about how
I went from owning a fish and chip shop to

(12:15):
going to university and then becoming a journalist is because
my journalism career has opened up the door to some
amazing opportunities, and of course part of that is storytelling,
and in more recent years, it has enabled me to
be able to return to the US on a journalist
visa and write stories about rural issues and farming issues

(12:35):
and political issues. And on one of these trips, I
was able to visit the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York,
where Buffalo Wings originated. Now, I was aware of that
fact because it was mentioned in the introduction to that
original wing recipe from that recipe book that I'd used
in nineteen ninety three. Now, the intro to that recipe

(13:00):
is this American classic originated at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo,
New York, where it is still a favorite with locals
and tourists alike. Now, little did I know that one
day I'd end up being one of those same tourists.
Some seventeen years later, visiting that famous bar at one
O four to seven Main Street and Buffalo Anyway, when

(13:20):
I arrived at the Anchor Bar, of course, I sat
at the bar and was soaking up the atmosphere and
taking my time eating a great plate of incredible original
buffalo wings. I eventually worked up the courage to ask
the Anchor Bar's executive chef, Ivano Toscani, if he would
agree to do a story for me, and that i'd

(13:40):
travel all the way from Australia to capture the story
of where and how buffalo wings originated.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Ivano generously agreed, and.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
He took me out the back into the Anchor Bar's kitchen,
which is obviously the engine room of the business, and
it's where all the magic happens. And I asked him
some questions and he gave me some great answers which
obviously had been well rehearsed over the years. I would say,
and that allowed me to write a great story about
the history and origins of this American classic, and to

(14:10):
be able to share that with readers down under. Now,
just a quick summary of the story that I wrote
and what I told me. And he said that the
original recipe and cooking method used by Theresa Bellasimo on
the night she invented buffalo wings in nineteen sixty four
is still being practiced at the Ankor Bar. Ivano said that, well,

(14:33):
Teresa didn't expect her wings to become an American legend.
They now rank alongside the hot Dog, James Dean and
Elvis for American icon status. And if you go to
a fancy restaurant, or if you sit at a bar
and have a bar menu, you will most likely find
buffalo wings. I also said that the Anchor Bar served

(14:54):
two thousand pounds, which is nine hundred and seven kilograms
of chicken wings every single day, and they're famous. Sauce
is also exported to Italy, Japan, France and Germany, and
they also ship fresh buffalo wings to just about anywhere
in the country. But just like London, there was no
way of buying them anywhere in Perth. So the only
way to solve that problem was to start making them myself.

(15:19):
So I started cooking my own wings at home. And
like most great inventions, the evolution of my recipe was
born out of necessity and it certainly involved a great
deal of trial and error.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Let's say the focus was on the errors at that time.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
But I started off by purchasing a recipe book that
had the recipes for three hundred and sixty five different
snacks and advertisers, and I've still got the book today.
Among the recipes was one for buffalo chicken wings and
another one for blue cheese dip. So this was at
the time it was a bit like discovering a map
to hidden treasure or a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's

(15:55):
chocolate factory. Originally, I followed this recipe very closely, cooked
the chicken wings using hot corn oil or peanut oil
bawling and a pot heated on an electric stove and
an old electric stove. But that now needless to say,
this somewhat primitive cooking method proved somewhat problematic and there

(16:16):
were some consequences that came with it, such as setting
fire to the kitchen and the curtains on more than
one occasion, definitely overcooking the wings on more than one occasion,
resulting in complaints from neighbors due to smoke inhalation, and
other catastrophes including splattering chili sauce and melted butter on

(16:38):
the walls. But I was determined to get the recipe right. However,
I learned from my mistakes and maintain a steadfast focus
on continuous improvement. And despite the misfired attempts and the
burnt curtains, I eventually found a groove and settled into

(16:58):
a consistent way of making it. Decent batch of buffalo wings,
still cooking buffalo wings. And while I enjoy cooking wings
for family and friends, there's certainly more time between wing
hits now than they used to be in my twenties.
And in fact, now I'm probably just as happy having
the carrots and the salary alone.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
And great job on that piece by Monty, and a
beautiful piece of storytelling by Colin Bettles. And he discovered
this well, this common food group here in the United States,
when he was a kid, when he was a college kid,
and the next thing, you know, this becomes his life's obsession,
the story of the chicken wing. And an RC listener
of our American Stories, Colin Bettles here on our American Stories.