The Cheap Chicken Dish From The '60s That's Not So Affordable Anymore

The rising price of chicken wings was inevitable once people learned how delicious they were after being fried and tossed in hot sauce. When wings first hit plates in 1964 at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, they were the perfect bar food — cheap, plentiful, and spicy enough to have you ordering another beer. Back then, wings were considered trash. Bars could toss them in hot sauce and serve them with celery and blue cheese, and offer them up on 10-cent wing nights that helped get people through the door. Fast-forward to 2021, and the great chicken wing shortage hit, when prices spiked and never really came back down.

In the decades between, wings went from bar snacks to an American staple. Nearly every town has at least one dedicated wing restaurant, whether that's a Buffalo Wild Wings, a Wingstop, or a local spot — mine is D's Wings. They come as appetizers or entrees served by the half dozen, featuring flavors ranging from crispy, dry lemon-pepper to sweat-inducing, buttery hot wings. Americans now eat nearly a billion servings a year, turning the once-overlooked cut into one of the country's most craved foods.

Few popular foods are as tricky to manage as chicken wings. You only get two per bird — four if you count the drum and the flat — and after years of shortages and price spikes, demand seems to have leveled out. Sure, you can get boneless wings, but nothing beats the primal, multisensory experience of picking up a chicken wing and gnawing it to the bone, finished with a lick of the fingers.

At restaurants across the country, what used to be a $6 bar basket now runs closer to $14. Toast's Menu Price Monitor shows the average wing order holding steady around that mark in 2025 — not soaring to 2021 levels, but never dropping back to the pre-pandemic prices, either. And it's not just the chicken. Everything that gets wings to the plate, from feed, oil, fuel, and labor, is driving the cost up. 

Even as prices stay high, Americans aren't giving them up. Wing night might cost more than it used to, but now we're addicted and willing to pay for our favorite Super Bowl snack. The real debate is: flats, drums, or boneless?