An Australian’s First Taste of Buffalo Wings
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Colin Bettles, an Our American Stories listener from Australia, had never heard of buffalo wings until a trip to upstate New York in the early 1990s. One plate was enough. The tender chicken, the heat of the sauce, and the cool bite of blue cheese made it love at first bite, and sparked a lifelong pursuit.
From discovering the dish’s roots at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, to trying to start his own wing shop in Australia, Bettles chased that original taste across continents. Here he is with his story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.0 | This is Lee Habib with Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, |
| 0:20.7 | including your story, send them to Our American Stories.com we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. |
| 0:21.6 | Send him to Our American Stories.com. |
| 0:24.4 | That's Our American Stories.com. |
| 0:26.6 | Our next story is a story from a listener from Australia, of all places, and how he came to fall in love of the food that is uniquely American, the Buffalo Wing. |
| 0:38.8 | My name's Colin Bettles. I'm 50 years old, and currently I live in Sydney, Australia, |
| 0:44.1 | which is on the other side of the country, about 4,000 kilometres or 2,500 miles away |
| 0:50.5 | from where I grew up in Perth. At age 20 in 1990 I set off from Perth before a working |
| 0:58.1 | holiday in the United Kingdom. I found my way to be working in a bar in the London suburb of Kensington |
| 1:05.2 | where I worked in between playing cricket for the London Theatre's cricket club, among others. |
| 1:12.4 | And in that bar, we mingled with students from all over the world. |
| 1:15.7 | And, you know, we gained a different tuition on each other's worlds over a few beverages |
| 1:21.1 | at the bar, of course. |
| 1:23.1 | And during this time, I made some very good friends. |
| 1:27.2 | So I didn't have any great conviction |
| 1:30.2 | about where I was going to travel to while I was on my working holiday. |
| 1:34.4 | And so I decided to go to the US and visit some of these friends that I'd made while working |
| 1:39.7 | in the bar. |
| 1:40.9 | And my first stop was to stay with a guy named James who I'd met who was attending a place |
| 1:46.0 | called Colgate University in a small college town called Hamilton in upstate New York. |
... |
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