a wordweck

Half of a sandwich name that lost its other half. Weck is the kummelweck roll: kosher salt and caraway seeds baked onto the top, softer and fluffier than the German Kümmelbrötchen it descends from. Buffalo-area bakeries are the only commercial source for it. Beef on weck — rare roast beef, hand-carved thin, the top of the roll dipped in jus, horseradish spread to taste — is one of the three foods Buffalo is known for, with wings and sponge candy.

The roll is a German loan that stopped travelling. Weck is a dialect word from southwestern Germany, carried to a Great Lakes port by German bakers and then fixed to one sandwich in one region, where it stayed. Inference — that is why it reads as a Buffalo word rather than a German one: outside western New York nobody has a use for it, so nobody borrowed it further.

It reached the wing world sideways. Buffalo Wild Wings was started by former western New Yorkers and opened as "Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck", abbreviated BW3 — the third W was the weck. The company dropped the W in 1998, and some people still say BW3 anyway. The chain used to serve an updated version of the sandwich called the Thirty-Fifth Weck Sandwich.

Ordered beside the wings, not instead of them: a Buffalo table that has ordered wings for the room orders a beef on weck for whoever did not want sauce on their hands. A pub owner is said to have used the salty roll to sell more drinks, which is the same trade a wing night makes.