Channel 7 in Buffalo:
http://www.wkbw.com/news/local/9486017.html
Post-Standard in Syracuse:
Lights! Camera! Wings!
Friday, August 31, 2007
SEAN KIRST
POST-STANDARD COLUMNIST Matt Reynolds was a little distracted. He was searching for perfection at the New York State Fair, and the search had been disrupted by the loss of his cell phone. Nick Boise, who is helping Reynolds in the hunt, sent a text message to Reynolds' number, promising a reward to anyone who might have picked up the phone.
At that point, reluctantly, Reynolds gave up on that small search to talk about his larger one. His Slovak girlfriend had headed off into the fairgrounds for a full dose of midway culture. A Slovak film crew traveling with Reynolds was also drifting around the fair. The crew spent a lot of time filming a cheerful vendor who demonstrated how to fire a rubber band from a wooden gun shaped like an automatic weapon.
All of that was only a break from the real quest. Reynolds, 31, a bemusingly self-described "315er" from Lyons in Wayne County, quit an overseas job as a reporter with Reuters to undertake an Upstate odyssey:
He is searching for the perfect chicken wing.
The idea came to him after he observed how Eastern Europeans, from Prague to Poland, reacted with rapture to his chicken wing parties.
He called me because we'd met years ago, and he knew I spent my life in a string of Upstate cities, where I'd eaten my way through my share of hot wings. My parents, as a young couple, provided the foundation. During the 1940s, they routinely went to a restaurant in Buffalo they knew as Frank & Teressa's, a restaurant that would grow famous under another name:
The Anchor Bar, birthplace of chicken wings. In 1987, when my mother was dying of cancer in Buffalo General Hospital, my siblings and I often took my dad to dinner at that landmark, where we ate wings while he stared at old photos on the wall, staring toward something that we could not quite see . . .
A mystery, which is how Reynolds explains his journey:
The quest is finding perfection in just one thing.
And perfection, in this case, begins and ends Upstate.
Reynolds has big hopes for the film, for which he's already found a quiet investor. He hopes this little sleeper of a "wingumentary" might delight a lot of viewers with some gentle truths.
At the fair, Reynolds interviewed Ray Alger, a guy from Auburn who routinely rides his bicycle to Syracuse while wearing spangled cowboy clothes. In a way, Alger defines the wild nature of the fair, and the Slovaks made sure to get that kind of stuff on film. Their entourage included a designated wing-eating champion, a big guy from Rochester called Thor, as well as Dave Reynolds, Matt's father, who debated with his son about which one of them should carry a family cane with a bronze rabbit's head as a handle.
They were irreverent about everything except the perfect wing. The Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, for instance, sent a special order to the fairgrounds for sampling. Matt and his judges ruled those wings out on a technicality: They were grilled, rather than deep-fried, Reynolds said, and they did not have the sort of vinegar, butter and "peppery" base that Reynolds uses to define a true buffalo wing.
As for my own wing experience, I offered what I knew. I told Reynolds the best wings I'd ever eaten came from a place called BJ's Downwind Cafe in Fredonia, wings so hot they would numb your lips and tongue. The culinary art was in the way you tasted them beyond the pain, and the taste was enough to always leave you wanting more.
Those were great wings, as close to perfect as I've tasted. But that was also 25 or 30 years ago, when wings were a regional phenomenon that hadn't spread too far from Buffalo. Since then, they've become a kind of Upstate calling card. In countless wing joints from Buffalo to Albany - where the bones could have filled the old Erie Canal - I've sampled wings that qualified as very good, and I've also had plenty of grease-drenched aberrations.
Reynolds said he had come into some fine wings in Albany, Plattsburgh and Seneca Falls. He also made a few unannounced stops at highly recommended wing joints in Auburn, Syracuse and other Central New York cities. His entourage visited an Auburn Doubledays game Wednesday, where Thor ate 40 wings in 15 minutes to win a wing-eating contest. From there, Reynolds planned to head west on the Thruway, pausing in Rochester before going to the citadel, Buffalo, for the international Wing Fest on Labor Day weekend.
He declined to speak too much about the essence of the film, once again explaining it as a "mystery."
His fairgrounds reverie was broken when his buddy's cell phone rang. A ticket-seller named Kim Blanchard had found Reynolds' cell phone and wanted to return it without reward, although a jubilant Reynolds insisted on giving her a little cash.
Her gesture, after all, was unexpectedly selfless: the perfect omen for a pilgrim, seeking just one perfect wing.
