Wing Fest ready to tempt your tastebuds

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - The chicken wing will be king in downtown Buffalo this weekend. News 4's Bryan Shaw took a bite out of the action as the Queen City gets ready to spice things up for Wingfest.

The 10th annual National Buffalo Chicken Wing Festival will kick off on Saturday at noon. The city has been famous for wings for a long time, but it was a movie that inspired the festival.

Wing King Drew Cerza explained, "There was a movie called "Osmosis Jones" with Bill Murray and he was a big junk food eater and he wanted to go to the Buffalo Wing Festival. There was no Buffalo Wing Festival. So the Buffalo News wrote a column saying we should do one. We invented the chicken wings back in 1964 at the Anchor Bar, someone should do the Wing Fest and I decided to do it."

On Wednesday, the Wing King visited the CW's Winging It! Buffalo Style to highlight all of the events at the Wing Fest. There are expected to be over 100 different sauces at the festival with a large variety of flavors.

"A lot of the sauces contain Frank's Red Hot as a base, but what has happened is different parts of the country have taken up chicken wings and have taken their own regional taste and flavors and they put it into the chicken wings," said Cerza.

The Wing Fest will have a bobbing for wings competition, a Miss Buffalo Wing competition, and an amateur sauce-off. The biggest competition though is the U.S. Chicken Wing Eating Championship at 4 p.m. Sunday with Sonya Thomas and Joey Chestnut.

Sonya has won the competition the past three years while Joey, who is ranked number one in the world by Major League Eating, holds the record at 7.5 lbs in 12 minutes. The competition is done by weight, but each wing is roughly a half of an ounce. That means Chestnut ate roughly 240 wings in 12 minutes.

News 4's Bryan Shaw gave it a shot against a local competitor and record holder for eating watermelon, Jim Reeves. He ate 10 wings in 90 seconds. To keep pace with Chestnut, he would have to eat three times that.