a thing that happens · NYNational Buffalo Wing Festival

A two-day wing festival held on Labor Day weekend at Sahlen Field, the minor-league ballpark in downtown Buffalo. Drew Cerza founded it in 2002. Vendors sell wings by the order, contests run all weekend — the US Chicken Wing Eating Championship on the Sunday since 2003, plus amateur sauce contests, a 5K, Miss Buffalo Wing and Bobbing for Wings — and a Hall of Flame inducts the people, families and restaurants that shaped the wing.

Cerza, whom the Buffalo News calls the Wing King, took the idea from a fictional festival in the 2001 film Osmosis Jones, and from a Buffalo News column by Donn Esmonde; the festival inducted both Esmonde and Bill Murray for it, in 2009 and 2011. Jill Greenburg accounted for the run this way: roughly $200,000 raised for local charities, almost 3,000,000 wings and 100 sauce varieties served to over 500,000 visitors. The festival's own site put the charity total at about $550,000 when read on 16 September 2026.

The eating contest keeps the records. Joey Chestnut took the trophy from seven-time champion Sonya Thomas on 2 September 2012 with 191 wings, 7.61 pounds, in twelve minutes; he lost it to Miki Sudo in 2013, won it back with 192 in 2014, set 205 in 2015 and 220 in 2017. Geoff Esper ate 281 in 2019. Miki Sudo took the women's title in 2021 with 246. James Webb beat Chestnut in 2023. The 2020 festival was cancelled for the pandemic, the nineteenth deferred to 2021; 2021 and 2022 ran at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, and the festival returned to Sahlen Field in 2025.

The Hall of Flame is the festival's own archive of the argument. Frank and Teressa Bellissimo went in first, in 2006, as creators of the original Buffalo wing sauce. Frank's RedHot followed in 2008, as the sauce used in 1964. Wingstop's Antonio Swad went in in 2010, Duff's in 2017, La Nova in 2016, Gabriel's Gate in 2019 for fifty years of wings. In 2013 the hall inducted John Mack Young, posthumously, as an early wing seller who may have predated the Anchor Bar's date — an induction that puts both sides of the origin argument in the same room.

Pay at the gate, then pay per order inside. Admission was $20 a day for the 2027 festival as advertised on 16 September 2026, children eight and under free, VIP Party Deck $45 a day; a single order of ten wings was about $13.80 plus tax. Vendors come from Buffalo and from out of state, and the Battle of the Border and Buffalo Buffet Bowl set them against each other.

The 2026 festival, the 25th, inducted the Perdue family into the Hall of Flame. The next one runs Saturday 4 September 2027, 11am to 8pm, and Sunday 5 September, 11am to 6pm, at Sahlen Field.