Oct. 01--Unlike the gyro or deep dish pizza, the origin of the Buffalo wing is fairly indisputable. It happened 51 years ago at Anchor Bar Restaurant in Buffalo, N.Y. The mother of the bartender, a woman named Teressa Bellissimo, was asked to prepare some food, so she improvised by taking chicken wings intended for the stock pot, deep frying them, and coating them with a hot sauce and butter. Today? Well, perhaps the folks at Anchor Bar should have trademarked the Buffalo wing name, because they'd be gazillionaires.
That singular flavor of hot sauce + butter + fried chicken + blue cheese has been fused into the taste memory of millions of Americans. It's a potent combination: The richness of butter and dressing cut through with sharp vinegary tang, and of course, chicken wings as the fried canvas.
In researching garlic butter chicken wings, an obsession of mine, trying to find the first cook to sauce fried wings with garlic butter has been a tougher task. In fact, on Lexis-Nexis (the database all journalists and researchers use), a search for "garlic butter wings" yielded only 13 mentions in the media over the past three decades. The few references I found were from Vietnamese restaurants in St. Louis and New Orleans. I didn't find any similar dishes in Chicago's Little Saigon.
Saucing chicken with garlic butter is seemingly an intuitive and obvious combination, but rarely is it found on restaurant menus. I first encountered it a decade ago when I was living in Orange County, Calif. There was a chain there called Charo Chicken in the oceanside town of Seal Beach. They would take whole chickens, grill them over charcoal, then mop them with a lemon garlic butter sauce. It was the same flavor profile as shrimp scampi, or the butter dip with chilled crab legs, only this was hot, crisp chicken off the grill. It still makes my toes curl thinking about it.
The only way to improve upon that? Why, deep fry that bird! My first experience in Chicago was, surprisingly, only a recent discovery. It was at Barn Company (950 W. Wrightwood Ave.), the Lincoln Park barbecue restaurant helmed by pitmaster and author Gary Wiviott. There, he takes wings brined in buttermilk, applies a dry rub, and smokes them with hickory wood for a few hours. Then he'll flash fry the wings for a minute to crisp up the skin, and sauce the finished product with garlic-infused butter. Crisp, smoky, the assertive presence of butter -- it's quite a rendition ($10), and dare I say, a flavor I find preferable to the spicy zing of the Buffalo wing.
There's a second place I encountered the elusive garlic butter wing, and it was at The Angry Crab in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Arcadia Terrace (5665 N. Lincoln Ave.). I previously reviewed the place, and you should go for the sloppy, tactile, joyously primordial experience of eating steamed crustaceans from a plastic bag. The surprising find was what's billed as "Angry Wings" ($7), which are just standard jumbo fried chicken wings, but one available option is to dress these with lemon garlic sauce. Goodness me, I like these a lot.
Try as I might, I haven't found another place that serves something similar. Are there any places in town that serve garlic butter or lemon garlic butter chicken wings? I see garlic Parmesan wings at a few places, but I'm looking for that noncheesed butter version. If you know any place, drop me a line below. I would love need to feed that obsession.
kpang@tribpub.com
Twitter @pang
