To hear Drew Cerza tell it, you go to Buffalo, N.Y., for the great food, you stay for the sports.
Cerza, also known as Buffalo’s Wing King, should know something about local food. In 2002 the Buffalo native founded the annual National Buffalo Wing Festival, a two-day food party that attracts 75,000 people to the shores of Lake Erie every Labor Day Weekend. Since then his name has become synonymous with Buffalo-style chicken wings.
Cerza has also become a prominent booster for Buffalo, and his role as an informal spokesman for one of America’s favorite snacks has led to TV appearances on Today, The Food Network, CNN and The Travel Channel.
Cerza himself is not in the restaurant business, but got the idea for the National Buffalo Wing Festival from a 2001 Bill Murray movie, Osmosis Jones, in which Murray’s character wants to go to a fictitious Buffalo wings festival. When local media began asking why there was no such festival, Cerza, who at the time worked for a food-promotion company, seized the opportunity.
The festival quickly grew into a kind of trade show for Buffalo-style wings, which are now found on menus around the world. Cooks, restaurateurs and chain-restaurant reps from the likes of Pizza Hut and KFC now make an annual pilgrimage to Buffalo. There are eating competitions, of course, but the cooks come to prove their mettle in contests for best traditional hot sauce, best traditional extra hot sauce (gulp!) and best traditional barbeque.
What’s at stake for the restaurants are bragging rights, according to Cerza.
“They come here for the camaraderie; it’s kind of a trade show for folks and they can promote their restaurants,” he says. “But when it comes down to wings contests, people really want to win.”
In 2008, festival-goers munched down half a million chicken wings (about 25 tons), but there’s more to culinary Buffalo than just chicken, Cerza says.
“Buffalo also has a local specialty, roast beef au Weck, which is roast beef au jus, horseradish and gravy on a kimmelweck, a salted roll with kimmelweck seeds,” he explains. “We also have the best char-broiled hot dogs, delicious pierogies and every other kind of restaurant available. There are a lot of pubs and corner places, too.”
He is also a big booster of Buffalo sports teams, mentioning the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, the NHL Buffalo Sabres and the minor-league Buffalo Bisons baseball team. He also notes that college teams are popular and that the SUNY at Buffalo Bulls football team recently competed in the International Bowl in Toronto.
Not that Cerza just sits at home munching wings and watching sports on TV, though.
“I love the winter air in Buffalo. I love the change of seasons. We ski, ice-skate, snowboard, tube, the whole works,” he says, noting that good downhill skiing is about an hour’s drive away.
He says it’s easy for him to be a goodwill ambassador for Buffalo.
“I enjoy it—it’s work but it’s pleasure, too,” Cerza offers. “The thing about Buffalo is the people; they’re very neighborly. I always say it’s tough to get people to come to Buffalo but it’s even tougher to get them to leave.”
Fireworks over Buffalo City Hall image courtesy of Buffalo Niagara CVB/Jim Bush
