By Angela Russo
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Every city has one restaurant that visitors ask about before they ask about anything else. In Buffalo, that restaurant is the Anchor Bar, the brick corner tavern at Main and North streets that has called itself the “Home of the Original” buffalo wing for six decades.
Ninety-one years after it opened, the question for this column is a simple one: is the original still worth the trip, or is it a photo stop with a fryer attached?
This column isn’t based on a visit. Nobody from The Chronicle ate there for this piece. It draws on the Anchor Bar’s own website and the menu it posts there, the company’s 2026 franchise disclosure filing, Erie County Department of Health inspection records, comments from the people who have run the place, published reviews from The Infatuation and Buffalo Rising, and a read of what Buffalonians say about it in public forums.
Where the wing came from
Frank and Teressa Bellissimo opened the Anchor Bar in 1935, and the restaurant’s history page tells the rest in a few lines. On March 4, 1964, their son Dominic Bellissimo was tending bar when hungry friends arrived late. His mother deep-fried a batch of chicken wings, the part usually saved for the stock pot, and tossed them in a sauce whose recipe the family still guards.
The bar started as an Italian restaurant, and it still lists spaghetti and pizza. But the wings made it famous. Mark Dempsey, the Anchor Bar’s vice president, put it plainly to WKBW in 2017.
“It was their culinary invention that put Buffalo on the culinary map,” Dempsey said.
The late owner Ivano Toscani, who ran the restaurant for decades, turned that fame into a business: bottled sauce in 1999 and franchising beginning in 2009. When Toscani died in 2018, Dempsey said his “leadership and guidance at the Anchor Bar cultivated a Buffalo staple into a world-famous food brand, sought by tourists and locals alike for the past several decades.” Wikipedia now counts 18 Anchor Bar locations, from Amherst to a new Tucson outpost that opened in late October 2025.
What’s on the menu, and what it costs
The menu posted on the Anchor Bar’s website, dated September 2025, lists traditional bone-in wings, billed as “fresh, never frozen,” at $16 for 10, $32 for 20 and $80 for 50. Boneless wings run $18, $36 and $90 for the same counts, and there are chicken tenders and an eight-piece order of plant-based wings. Dipping choices are ranch, bleu cheese or what the restaurant calls Extreme Ranch.
That is a long way from the $12.99 a 10-piece cost on the restaurant’s 2020 menu, and from the $13 that Meat+Poultry reported in 2015. It’s the price of a legend, and it’s a big part of the local grumbling.
The method, at least as described in that 2015 trade-magazine visit, is old-school. Wings were fried in vegetable oil at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes, and size mattered.
“We use jumbo wings,” Toscani told the magazine. “But we don’t want them too big because the meat is tough.”
Volume was the other story. “Today, we sell about 2,000 lbs. of chicken wings a day,” Toscani said at the time.
What the critics say
Professional reviews are respectful, not reverent. David Neimanis, reviewing the Main Street original for The Infatuation in February 2025, called it “undeniably an institution in Buffalo” but said its reputation has been “diluted by national expansion.”
“The wings here lean vinegary and may lack some juiciness, but hey, you’re here for the history and the vibes,” Neimanis wrote. His advice was to skip the spaghetti and meatballs and stick to wings and a cold beer.
A Buffalo Rising writer touring the city’s wing scene in 2015 was kinder, calling the medium wings “crispy with just enough spice” and using them as the baseline for every other wing in town. Other reviewers have warned that medium may be too mild for serious heat-seekers.
Public forum posts from Buffalonians follow a steady pattern. Locals on Reddit’s r/Buffalo board have long described the Anchor Bar as the city’s one truly touristy restaurant and called the wings overpriced, while still pointing out-of-towners there for the history. Dempsey’s pitch leans into exactly that.
“The customer service is great, but it’s the ambience. There’s quite a bit of history and memorabilia, quite a bit of awards, a couple gold medals. A lot of celebrities have been here as well, so it’s a very unique place,” Dempsey said in 2017. The restaurant’s 2020 menu cites a James Beard Foundation “America’s Classics” award.
What the inspectors found
Erie County’s online inspection records show no critical violations at 1047 Main St. in its two most recent inspections. A routine visit on Sept. 3, 2026, logged four non-critical items: no paper towels at a basement hand sink where food prep happens, an old used-cooking-oil dumpster left open in a rear garage, a pizza cooler without a thermometer, and employees without hair restraints. Inspectors noted that cooler and food temperatures were satisfactory.
A Sept. 18 re-inspection found one remaining non-critical issue, the hair restraints, marked as a repeat. A January 2026 routine inspection also found three non-critical items. The last critical violation on the public record came in April 2025, when an inspector saw a worker cutting romaine with bare hands; the lettuce was discarded and the problem was corrected on the spot.
The verdict
The Anchor Bar is for visitors, for wing pilgrims and for Buffalonians playing host who want to show off where it started. Go for the building, the signs and a basket of mediums with bleu cheese, and expect to pay a premium for the address.
If you live here and just want great wings, the published record suggests the city has plenty of neighborhood bars and pizzerias that match it for less. But nobody else can sell you 1964, and on that score the original still delivers.
If you go
Anchor Bar
1047 Main St., Buffalo (at North Street)
(716) 883-1134 · anchorbar.com
Hours (as posted by the restaurant): Monday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Thanksgiving.
Price range: Per the restaurant’s September 2025 online menu, traditional wings run $16 for 10 to $80 for 50; boneless $18 to $90.
Sources: Anchor Bar history page and online menu; Anchor Bar 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document; Erie County Department of Health inspection records; The Infatuation, Feb. 4, 2025; WKBW, Aug. 22, 2017; Meat+Poultry, Dec. 29, 2015; Buffalo Rising, January 2015; WNY Papers, Nov. 21, 2018; public r/Buffalo discussions on Reddit.
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