Buffalo Wild Wings is, technically, a restaurant chain specializing in the most popular regional delicacy ever to come from Buffalo, New York. But its original menu — and its earlier name — really hammered home its connection to New York’s Queen City.
The restaurant that would come to be known as Buffalo Wild Wings was founded in the early ‘80s by Jim Disbrow and Scott Lowery, who, according to the company, had just “moved to Ohio from Buffalo, New York.” (Lowery, speaking with the Dayton Daily News in July, said that both of them had lived in Buffalo for a time, but Lowery was living in Ohio and Disbrow in Pittsburgh when they formulated the idea for a wing restaurant.)
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As the story goes, Disbrow visited Lowery in Ohio one weekend and — after a night of drinking — went looking for something to eat. The two men challenged themselves to find a place that served Buffalo-style chicken wings, and when they couldn’t, they started tossing around the idea of opening just such an eatery themselves.
Within a few years, they had acquired two additional partners and enough capital to open their own chicken wing restaurant. They also settled on a location in Columbus, Ohio, near the Ohio State University campus.
Oddly, the space they leased had formerly housed another chicken wing restaurant — which went out of business a few months before they moved in.
“I’m still amazed that we actually went into a failed location and did what had just failed,” Lowery said in a 2021 interview with author and restaurant marketing executive Matt Plapp. “It makes no sense in the world.”
That very first restaurant’s name was Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck — “weck” being a reference to Buffalo’s popular beef on weck sandwiches, which consist of carved beef served on a kummelweck roll (similar to a kaiser roll), usually with horseradish.
And yes, beef on weck sandwiches were on the menu at the first Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck, according to Lowery and the local patrons who remember the original restaurant fondly.
Many former customers also remembered the restaurant hosting discount wing nights, serving whole chicken legs, and offering up plenty of “pizza logs” — another popular finger food in the Buffalo area.
“God, those were good,” one Reddit user said of the pizza logs.
The first years were a bit bumpy, Lowery said, but he, Disbrow and their business partners eventually grew their operations and decided to franchise their concept in the early ‘90s. And by the end of the decade, “Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck” (or BW3, as it was nicknamed) had been shortened to simply “Buffalo Wild Wings” by the creative teams that Lowery and his business partners had hired to help with their operations, perhaps so it would fit better “on a marquee,” Lowery theorized.
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A representative for Buffalo Wild Wings was not immediately available to confirm when the restaurants made the switch. Lowery suggested in his 2021 interview that the name changed in “probably the late ‘90s.”
The menu, too, changed when Buffalo Wild Wings expanded nationwide, and today there are no beef on weck sandwiches or pizza logs (“pepperoni pockets,” as B-Dubs called them) to be found at U.S. restaurants. (A beef on weck sandwich was briefly offered during the chain’s 35th anniversary in 2017, but left the menu shortly afterward.)
The company’s earliest fans, however, still reminisce about all three W’s.
“Only real ones remember BW3,” one user on social media wrote earlier this week.
