Chicken Fingers

Breaded chicken tenders, often tossed in wing sauce just like wings, and served with fries, celery and blue cheese.

🏆 Where to get the best chicken fingers

1 The Griffon Gastropub, Military Road Town of Niagara · 🏠 Locally owned A locally owned gastropub famous for its hand-made, hand-dipped chicken fingers. People drive in from all over Buffalo for them. The Friday fish fry is a must too.

Also serving it

📜 A little history

Breaded chicken strips are served all over America, and Buffalo has no strong claim to inventing them. Researchers have found "chicken fingers" in a 1966 ad for a Pennsylvania restaurant, and places in New Hampshire, Georgia and elsewhere have claimed to be first.

What Western New York did was make them its own. Here fingers are often tossed in hot sauce like wings and served with blue cheese. Then came the chicken finger sub. John's Pizza & Subs in Tonawanda says it started putting sauced fingers on sub rolls with blue cheese in the early 1980s. Jim's SteakOut, which opened in 1981, also says it introduced the sandwich. Either way, the sub is now a fixture on pizzeria menus across the region.

Did you know? Jim's SteakOut told Taste that it sells more than 800 chicken finger subs a week across its locations.