Great Chicken Wing Hunt

Tue Feb 18, 2014 – 7:30 pm — Domenico’s  Tickets
Sat Feb 22, 2014 –  5:00 pm — Bagels & More  Tickets
Sun Feb 23, 2014 –  2:00 pm — Domenico’s  Tickets

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Great Chicken Wing Hunt
A man on a quest for perfection. The woman who stood by him. The misfits who made history.


Great Chicken Wing Hunt
Category:  Comedy / Road Trip
Country:  Czech Republic / U.S.
Language:  English
Rating:  PG
Runtime:  70 min.
Director:  Matt Reynolds
Producer:  Elizabeth Mandel

Filmmaker Attending

 

Synopsis:

The year is 1964 in Buffalo, New York, and Teressa Bellissimo, co-owner of a family-run restaurant called the Anchor Bar, is asked to whip up a midnight snack for her son and his gang of friends.  Luckily, this gives her the perfect excuse to use a box of chicken scraps—all wings—mistakenly sent to the bar that morning.  Improvising, she concocts a special sauce she knows her spice-loving boy will like.  A few minutes later, the Buffalo chicken wing is born, and the world would never be the same.

Almost 50 years later, the citizens of Bratislava, Slovakia are discovering Buffalo wings for the first time, at a series of tasting parties thrown by amateur wing chef Matt Reynolds, an American expatriate, international journalist and upstate New York native who has been living in Eastern Europe for the past ten years. Stirred by the Slovaks’ enthusiastic response, Reynolds’ fervor for his favorite boyhood food takes on a life of its own, and his relationship with the wing grows into an obsession.

Ultimately, in a move that stuns his friends and co-workers, he announces he will be permanently leaving Bratislava, his career at Reuters and the entire life he has worked so hard to build, in pursuit of a singular objective: find the world’s best Buffalo chicken wing.  With his long-suffering Czech girlfriend Lucie and a perplexed Slovak film crew in tow, Wayne County’s prodigal son embarks on THE GREAT CHICKEN WING HUNT.

Also joining him on this quest is a ragtag gang of wing-obsessed misfits, most of whom were recruited through a website Reynolds has launched to promote the Hunt: Al, lovable hippie holdover, collector of strange objects and folk singer; Thor, larger-than-life competitive eating champ, barn bash thrower and woodwright; Ron, suburban father, buck hunter and lifelong employee of Eastman Kodak; Ric, aggressively mellow Hawaiian chef, medical student and life coach; and a rotating cast of many others.

The film opens with a history of the Buffalo wing and an introduction to the main Hunters. After receiving the blessing of Dom Zanghi, the last living witness from that fateful night at the Anchor Bar long ago, Matt and his caravan of characters set out on their 2,627 mile journey, which starts in New York City amidst a hubbub of media attention and snakes its way through the heart of Wing Country and the land of Reynolds’ childhood.  Along the way they will stop at dozens upon dozens of wing joints and try 284 varieties of wing, a grind that will sow displeasure and dissent amongst the group and put a serious strain on Matt and Lucie’s relationship.

As the story unfolds, we realize that the Hunt isn’t just about finding the perfect wing—though they do, in one of the most unlikely of places—but for Matt it is also about discovering something more profound.  In the end, he realizes that what he has been searching for was right under his nose all along.

NOTE:  Synopsis are typically provided directly by the filmmaker themselves. Often English is not their first language. We ask reader’s understanding for less-than-perfect language and grammar