All things considered: November 2009

There he was sitting in the corner. In person he was much bigger than
on television. His arms were like branches on an old oak – knotted and
huge.

There he was sitting in the corner. In person he was much bigger than on television. His arms were like branches on an old oak – knotted and huge. His shoulders looked like the deck of an aircraft carrier – broad and massive. His neck, he must have had one but it had disappeared, hidden, I assume, by all the muscles.

His name was Sweet Daddy Siki and there he was sitting across the room from us. In front of him was a platter mounded with chicken wings.

Today, the wings part of the scene might not be that unusual. But back then – we’re talking decades ago – wings hadn’t taken off. They were known by Buffalo locals (and those of us from just across the Niagara River) and only made at the Anchor Bar.

Back then the Anchor Bar was just one of the dozens of corner bars scattered around Buffalo. To say it was humble would be an overstatement. It had a long bar, a few tables and a kitchen in the back.

Sweet Daddy was a wrestler, he was on television and in my mind that made him a celebrity. In fact, it made him the second celebrity I had ever been in the same room with. The first was Ted (Teeder) Kennedy, the former Leaf captain (when Toronto had a real NHL hockey team) and the last Leaf to be named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Kennedy, who recently died, was from my hometown of Port Colborne, Ont., and I was in the arena when he played in a charity game shortly after his retirement.

In retrospect, seeing Sweet Daddy eating wings should have tipped me off that something significant was happening. If that wasn’t enough to drive the message home, a short while later friends told me that they had gone to the Anchor Bar after an NBA game (Buffalo had an NBA team for a couple of years) and saw Wilt Chamberlain pick up a rather large take-out order.

I stopped in at the Anchor Bar last year, having not been there for many, many years. The place had completely changed. They had put on an addition, added a lot of tables, built a parking lot and made it very, very nice. Back when Sweet Daddy visited, the Anchor Bar was a respectable, reputable, family-run bar. It was much nicer than many of the others in the area, but calling it nice would have been a stretch.

As we all now know, the Anchor Bar started something. Chicken wings soon became a local and then a regional delicacy.  Soon pubs across North America were cooking up and serving wings.

A brew pub in Regina, where I was living, put them on the menu about 15 years ago. Craving a taste of home, I tried them. They tasted as if they were cooked in vinegar and were nothing like the originals.

I concluded that if you wanted good wings you had to be within driving distance of Buffalo. And for a while that rule held. But today you can get good, or at least pretty good, wings across North America.

Fast food restaurants, who know how to measure demand, have jumped on board. Wings are everywhere.

It’s been a remarkable evolution. It began with a lady working in the kitchen of the family bar deciding that she didn’t want to throw the chicken wings away and that she would find a way to cook them up and sell them. Now, wings are among the most valuable parts of a chicken.

In fact, the latest USDA report indicates that wings may now be more valuable than chicken breasts on a pound per pound basis.

In the back of my occasionally twisted brain there is the image of a poultry scientist looking at the image of the latest big-breasted bird, glancing at the USDA numbers, slapping his forehead and saying, “I should have been working on the wings.”

But the scientist can be forgiven. There is no way he could have known that wings would play such a huge role in the future of chicken.

I, on the other hand, have no such excuse. I’ve been eating wings for decades. My friends and family have been doing the same. Occasionally, we would even make the 20-mile drive down Highway 3, cross the Peace Bridge, pick up a supply of wings from the Anchor Bar and take them home.

Even if I had doubted that something that tantalized my taste buds would resonate with others those doubts should have been put to rest when I saw Sweet Daddy.

In today’s world he would be on television promoting the wings and you would never know if he was just doing it for the money. Back then there were no endorsement deals and he was eating them because he liked them. I should have known that Sweet Daddy was on to something and I was watching the beginning of a continent-wide phenomenon.