You will be hard-pressed to find a pizza chain that doesn’t also serve chicken wings these days. This classic combo has been a fast-casual menu staple since the 1990s, and who wouldn’t want to pair a cheesy, carb-packed pie with crispy, glistening chicken wings? But to understand how and why this trend first started, we must go back to 1950s Buffalo, New York.
Origin stories in the culinary world are notoriously murky; however, Buffalo’s long-running La Nova Pizza (one of the best spots in the city for pizza) is often credited with being the small pizza shop to take serving pizza and wings together to the mainstream. Opened in 1957, La Nova started as a family affair when a father-son duo, both named Joe Todaro (i.e., Papa Joe and Big Joe), began running the joint. It wasn’t until the ’90s when Big Joe’s son, Joey (yes, this is the third Joe Todaro), noticed something unique about the pizza scene in Buffalo, New York: It was the only part of the country where pizza shops were also serving deep-fried wings with their pies.
In an interview with PizzaMarketPlace.com, Joey Toldaro details how he and his sister, Carla, convinced their father to commercialize their trademark wings to the masses. “The country didn’t seem to have them, and people came from all over to get our wings,” Todaro recalled. “So I thought, ‘Why can’t we duplicate ours for the pizza industry?'” According to family lore, Big Joe was skeptical, but after seeing the passion of his children, he gave it a shot. After all, Big Joe believed his children symbolized the future of the pizza business, so at the very least, he should get out of their way.
Buffalo, NY is the birthplace of this combo
The truth is that when the Todaros launched their wing business in 1994, hot Buffalo chicken wings were a relatively new dish to the culinary world. A handful of decades earlier, right around the time the eldest Joe Todaro opened La Nova Pizza, wings were seen as a “throwaway” cut of meat. It wasn’t until the 1960s when two restaurants, Wings and Things and Anchor Bar, began serving saucy, fried chicken wings that this classic became inextricably tied to the food scene of Buffalo, New York.
The debatable origin story of Buffalo wings makes it unclear whether Frank and Teressa Bellissimo of Anchor Bar were the first to popularize the style, as many claim, or if they stole the idea from John Young’s Black-owned restaurant Wings and Things, which was just down the street. Regardless, both restaurants were in the center of Buffalo’s chicken wing boom. Approximately 30 years later, in 1994, Joey and Carla Todaro brought their new venture, La Nova Wings, Inc., to the International Pizza Expo, where they expounded on the popularity of serving chicken wings with your pizza.
So, while the La Nova Pizza crew certainly weren’t the first to think of chicken wings (or even pizza and wings), they were the first to capitalize on it on a massive scale. Today, La Nova Wings, Inc., aka “the company that introduced chicken wings into the pizza industry!,” is said to have sold billions and billions of wings. Who knew that the simple act of smashing together two delicious party bites could result in a game-changing industry?
