A Stinger is a sub containing both steak and chicken fingers, usually dressed with hot sauce and bleu cheese, plus lettuce, tomato, and onion. Yes, both meats. Yes, on purpose.
If you did not grow up here, your first reaction is that this is a dare. If you did grow up here, you ordered one at two in the morning in high school and never questioned it.
Where the name comes from
It is a portmanteau, and once you see it you cannot unsee it: steak plus chinger, or steak plus finger, depending on who is explaining. Steak. Finger. Stinger. That is the whole joke.
The hot sauce helps the name land, but the sauce is not where the word came from. It is a compound of the two proteins, which is the most Buffalo possible way to name a sandwich: purely descriptive, slightly goofy, no marketing involved.
Who invented it (nobody knows, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise)
This one is genuinely unsettled. You will see confident claims that it was invented at one shop or another in 2008. That date is provably too late — there is a Buffalo News reference to a "stinger sub" on a menu, with the steak-and-chicken-finger construction spelled out, back in 2005.
Other claims push it earlier still, into the 1980s, as an evolution of the chicken parm sub. At least three different Western New York shops have been credited by somebody. None of them has produced anything like decisive evidence.
So the honest answer is: the Stinger is a Buffalo sandwich of uncertain parentage, documented since at least the mid-2000s, probably older, invented by somebody who was almost certainly not trying to make history. This puts it in good company — the origin story of the chicken wing has similar problems, and that one is world famous.
Three shops claim it. The paper trail beats all three. Buffalo's food history is mostly like this.
What separates a good one from a bad one
The failure mode of a Stinger is sogginess. You have two proteins, a sauce, and a bleu cheese, all going onto bread that has to survive the trip. A good one manages moisture:
- The chicken fingers stay crisp. They should be fried to order and sauced late, not sitting in hot sauce waiting.
- The steak is chopped, not sliced thick. You want an even bite, not a tug-of-war.
- Bleu cheese goes on the bread, not dumped on top, so it insulates rather than soaks.
- The roll is sturdy. A soft sub roll will not survive this and everyone knows it.
Get those right and it stops being a novelty and starts being a genuinely well-built sandwich. Get them wrong and you are eating a wet paper bag with meat in it.
It is not a health food and nobody has ever pretended otherwise. It is a sandwich engineered for after a shift, after a game, or after a few pints — the same slot occupied by a late Buffalo-style pizza — which is why it turns up on so many kitchens' late menus, and why it is a fixture in this stretch of Main Street near campus.
Ours
We build it the way described above, and it sits with the rest of the handhelds on the sandwich list. If you want the older, quieter, more respectable Buffalo sandwich instead, that is beef on weck, and ours is two lines up.
The kitchen runs until 10pm Tuesday through Saturday. The bar runs later. You can find the whole thing here.