I Came for the Original Buffalo Wings but Found a City Reinventing Tradition

“My city smells like Cheerios.”

That’s one of the slogans you’ll see on souvenirs and T-shirts in Buffalo, New York. It’s also one that I nearly overlooked on my recent visit, just like I’d overlooked the Cheerios and other General Mills cereals in my breakfast buffet. Just as I’d overlooked George Urban Boulevard as my Uber sped me from the airport to my hotel. All of these things would come to have significance later, but when I first arrived in Buffalo, all I could think about was my bed.

I didn’t expect my hotel to be inside a former asylum — the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, now partially restored as part of the Richardson Olmsted campus. Designed in the 1800s by a young Henry Hobson Richardson, a pioneering American architect who helped to shape Buffalo’s identity, the complex has long been one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks. After the last patients left in the 1970s, the site sat largely vacant for years, fenced off and overgrown, remembered by locals as a place to sneak into or avoid late at night.

Photo: Pierre Williot/Shutterstock

Today, community-led restoration and adaptive reuse have given it new life as part hotel, part museum, part cultural space. Pulling up at twilight, I was struck by the dollhouse-like facade, the scale of its high ceilings and globe chandeliers, and the reassurance of knowing that these walls were built for healing and rest. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.

The Richardson Hotel was the first of many surprises I encountered while in Buffalo, and it reflected something bigger happening across the city: a quiet pride in bringing the past forward. While I came to Buffalo expecting to discover chicken wings and other classic bites, what I found was a complex history where food carries both memory and meaning. This wasn’t just a trip stuffing myself with bar food — it was a reminder that even the most familiar places have stories waiting beneath the surface.

Getting my first taste of Buffalo

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Prior to any trip, I make it a point to look up what foods can give me a sense of place and a spark of curiosity for my destination. In Buffalo, the first thing that came to mind was wings.

I took refuge in the cool bar section of Anchor Bar one afternoon to escape into a plate of classic wings in the place that claims to have invented them. I ordered the “medium” spice level, which is the closest to the 1964 version invented by Teressa Bellissimo as a snack for her son (with blue cheese, of course, never ranch).

Anchor Bar is one of the stops on the Ultimate Buffalo Food Trail, which serves as a roadmap for foodies wanting to try classic Buffalonian dishes. You’ll find various themed “trails” based on different dishes, or if you’d prefer to stay in one section of town, you can also find restaurants grouped by proximity.

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Next, I wanted to try a contribution from German immigrants: the sandwich known as beef on weck, made with roast beef on a kummelweck (or “weck”) roll. Charlie the Butcher is one of the chains that’s famous for it, and it shows. The woman behind the counter even asked if I wanted to get a photo of her carving up the thick slices of roast beef for my sandwich. The caraway-seeded roll and salty jus showed off the flavors well with a bit of horseradish.

For dessert, I popped into nearby Watson’s Chocolates, one of a handful of confectionery shops and ice cream parlors where you can try an English immigrant contribution to the nostalgic classics, sponge candy. Little cubes of an airy, honeycomb-like candy coated in milk or dark chocolate were the perfect sweet note to end on.

Diving deeper into Buffalo’s food history

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Buffalo’s “classic” food trail is easy and approachable, but as I delved further into the city’s culinary history, I kept coming face to face with Buffalo’s milling history — from the General Mills cereals at the hotel breakfast, to the scent of Cheerios that wafts through the downtown air, to the huge grain silos downtown being adapted for reuse. This brings me back to George Urban Boulevard, the key corridor that had led me into the city from the airport.

Jill Collela, a Buffalo native and owner of the Miller’s Thumb bakery in Tonawanda, filled me in as I munched on a fan favorite cookie called The Cheerful Oat (the original name for Cheerios). George Urban was responsible for bringing the roller mill to Buffalo, which drastically changed the amount and quality of flour compared to the old stone mills in use before.

“The roller mill was essentially the moment that food in America got industrialized,” Collela explained. “That is the direct fast pathway to industrialized food happening in Buffalo.”

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This rise in milled white flour production is what ushered in a huge baking industry in Buffalo with enormous grain silos, factories, and railroad lines to connect and move workers and goods. Despite being such an innovative technology, however, the roller mill and the resulting industrialization also led to a disconnect with what wheat actually should taste like. Which is exactly what the Miller’s Thumb hopes to reverse and why I’d made an out-of-the-way stop in Tonawanda, a Buffalo suburb, to visit.

Steve Horton, Collela’s partner, is going back to basics. He mills his own flour and tests different grinds and levels of whiteness to experiment with the best possible uses in naturally leavened breads like sourdough, which use naturally occurring yeast and bacteria as opposed to commercial yeast. The same desire to experiment with flavor profiles extends to creative pastries, scones, and other baked goods.

Collela, born in Buffalo, had always planned to get away. She left for more than 28 years, but has since returned with Steve, and things came full circle.

“Never in a million years would I have thought I would live here, a stone’s throw from where I grew up and own a bakery. But here I am.”

Besides the Cheerful Oat, another popular seller is the Wonder Loaf, an homage to Wonder Bread, whose massive factory still stands in the East side of Buffalo, although letters have gone missing from the famous sign, which now reads, “WO D R R AD.”

Finding community and global flavors

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I moved throughout my day picking up the food trail and chasing down other recommendations, doing some classic sightseeing like the Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright, grabbing a cold beer in a hidden spot among the empty grain silos downtown, browsing the neighborhood boutiques in Elmwood Village, and walking around the stately Richardson Olmsted campus.

Looking for a break from the heat, I walked into Stitch Buffalo, a nonprofit focusing on textile arts, both via classes and as a community space to help empower and uplift refugee women in the Buffalo community. I instantly felt at home. My mom had a business working with textiles when I was growing up, and she was an entrepreneur. Seeing women stationed in front of their sewing machines in the industrial space, I thought of how much that business meant to her and connected her with other women.

Stitch Buffalo kept coming up when I’d ask people for places I should visit for a sense of community. As Executive Director Dawne Hoeg describes it, they are literally stitching together the community, focusing on connection and empowerment for these women from countries such as Myanmar, Bhutan, Congo, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Peru, and China. It provides a feeling of belonging, safety, and camaraderie.

“We even hold potlucks where all the women come together to bring foods from their home countries,” Hoeg mentioned.

I realized my stomach was growling, signaling that it was time for me to wrap up my purchases. I selected a couple of small hand stitched souvenirs: a “Buffalo Love” heart pin and a felted eyeglass case for myself since I’d recently lost mine. I turned over the card to reveal the name of the women who made each piece, a nice touch to help connect the thread beyond Stitch Buffalo’s walls and into the community.

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As my Uber pulled up to my lunch stop, I took in the old facade of the building now housing the West Side Bazaar. As in many other projects designated for adaptive reuse in Buffalo, this building has been given new life as an incubator of sorts, with commercial kitchen space for eight restaurants in the ground floor food court, additional stalls and shops above, and a bar that appeared closed for lunch.

The next table over was a group of colleagues on their lunch break. I envied them being able to order more and share as there were too many tempting options to choose from: Egyptian, Congolese, Korean, Thai, Jamaican, and soul food stalls were putting out their menus and taking the day’s first customers.

Chatting with the owners at each stall and getting their recommendations for what to try or their best-selling items was so tempting. I loved having such a global representation on my table. I ended up with a Korean bibimbap, Congolese-style crab cakes, and a Thai iced tea. Perhaps it might not all go together perfectly, but you could see the care and pride that each business put into the dishes, and it made me appreciate the diversity of Buffalo’s population today.

Realizing there’s more to learn

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In 2025, New York is marking 200 years since the opening of the Erie Canal, a turning point that transformed Buffalo into a gateway city. So, later that day, I headed down to the redeveloped shore of the Erie Canal, known as Canalside. Despite the sweltering heat, families were enjoying local ice cream near the historic carousel. Couples walked on the boardwalk and sat on Adirondack chairs placed on the lawn nearby.

I was there to see the replica Erie Canal Boat Seneca Chief, a historic replica which in just a few weeks would be retracing the original route to New York City on a 33-day journey as a part of the bicentennial commemoration.

Whitney Chreighton from the Buffalo Maritime Center explained how the community pulled together and volunteers, even those with no shipbuilding experience, worked to get the replica boat finished. It is truly a pride of the community.

But just a few steps away, in the Waterways of Change exhibit, the story deepened.

Inside the Longshed, where the Seneca Chief was constructed, the exhibit by the Buffalo History Museum traces the canal’s multilayered legacy. It’s an acknowledgment of what’s often been left out of history books: the Indigenous land the canal displaced, the forced removal of Seneca people, and the ways the canal facilitated both commerce and freedom.

“The canal was the internet back then,” said Jill Colella, describing how it carried not just goods but ideas, supporting movements like abolition and women’s suffrage.

Until that moment, I’d mostly focused on what Buffalo had preserved. I’d loved sampling all the Buffalo classics that told an immigrant story going back to the first German, Irish, Polish, and English immigrants, and seeing the newer waves represented at the West Side Bazaar and in the hands at Stitch Buffalo that had come together to literally help build the boat that would be celebrating the canal. I’d paid respect to the milling history of a town that literally smells like Cheerios.

But the Waterways of Change exhibit reminded me that even the most celebrated infrastructure projects have a cost. And that memory, like pride, can be layered.

For visitors, this is a chance to engage with Buffalo beyond the surface. The Waterways of Change exhibit at Canalside and the Buffalo History Museum are great entry points to start digging deeper. It’s easy to come to Canalside to grab an ice cream cone, ride on the carousel, or sit in the lawn chairs. But if you pull back the layers, you can see the city recognizing its own history and building toward something more whole.

I’d arrived in Buffalo with an empty stomach, some curiosity, and a bit of naivete. I’d love to return to learn even more one day, perhaps when Colella realizes her dream to open a food museum, or to see if more can be done to honor the Indigenous foodways of such an important place. Buffalonians have long rooted for their team as underdogs. Now, with good reason, they’re embracing the spotlight. I’m rooting for you, Buffalo. And I’ll be back.

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