BOSTON DIVISION:
#2 Buffalo Wings at the Anchor Bar, Buffalo
Buffalo wings are incredible. This is an objective fact. The smell of hot buffalo sauce alone makes my mouth water like nothing else. I've roamed the earth (well, the US) and eaten buffalo wings all over, and had some good ones, too. I chose the Anchor Bar as a representative for several reasons. 1) They were probably the best. This should be reason enough. 2) I made a trip with my father specifically to eat these wings. So yes, it's going to stand out in my mind as the Platonic Buffalo Wings. 3) Since Buffalo Wings were invented here, it's a good way to remark on the improbability of this perfect food. Consider this: in our parents' lifetimes, chicken wings were considered throwaway scraps. Junk. Inedible. Their creation was more accident than inspiration, and when word started to spread, people thought it was a joke. And for the spicy wings to be served with hot sauce AND blue cheese dressing just added to the oddity. But I really think that a chicken wing with buffalo sauce, steaming hot, and dipped in blue cheese sauce, is perfection in food. Cannot-be-improved-upon. It's the culinary version of "Born to Run". It's a holy food, a sacrament.
#7: Fried Clams, Cape Cod
I really, really, like shellfish. (I'm not the world's best Jew.) Normally my pick would be C. Gigantas oysters, raw on the halfshell, with a light spray of lemon. It tastes like licking the bottom of a boat, except fresh. Fried clams are not like that. At all. Fry shops dot the quiet roads of the Cape, and you don't get the delicate presentation that comes with raw shellfish, you get a hoagie roll literally overflowing with clams fried in buttermilk or cornbread. You top it with lemon juice and tartar sauce. You eat until you're full. Clams and oysters and lobster and crab and shrimp are in abundance here, and served accordingly.
WINNER: The wings. I called them a sacrament, and meant it.
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