Buffalo might be synonymous with hot wings, but there’s a less heralded bar staple that represents the city even better. The locally beloved roast beef on a caraway-seed-studded kümmelweck roll is a legacy left over from German immigrants who flocked to the northern New York metropolis in the early 19th century in search of jobs in the flourishing shipping and milling industries.
Beef on weck is still on the menu at many local restaurants and deli counters – most famously at Schwabl’s in nearby West Seneca, New York, where it’s proudly been served since 1837 – though middling versions abound. But when Tom Moriarty opened Moriarty Meats, a French-style whole-animal butcher and cafe in the Black Rock neighborhood five years ago, he determined to give the signature sandwich gourmet treatment. He serves boeuf on weck, piling thin slices of tender, locally sourced beef round, slow-roasted for hours, on a springy, house-made bun slathered with a zesty horseradish mayonnaise.
The Moriarty Meats sandwich is emblematic of the recent evolution in the city’s dining scene. Buffalonians are proud of their hometown food traditions, but now the many new and returning cooks are not only invigorating staples such as beef on weck but also moving beyond them.
“There’s a certain level of civic pride that people have in Buffalo if you’ve grown up here,” says Moriarty, who opened his original location with his wife, Caitlin after spending years studying abroad in Europe and apprenticing in French butcher shops. “There’s always been a lot of people nationally who look down on Buffalo because it went through a lot of hard times through the years. But for the people who’ve lived here, it’s always been a great community.”
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The city has quietly emerged as a bona fide culinary destination, boasting international food halls, world-class barbecue, craft cocktail bars and award-winning fine-dining restaurants. But the transition didn’t happen overnight.
“To spoon-feed Buffalo new ideas, you’ve got to do it with respect and ease,” says Tim Stevens, whose string of local cocktail bars includes Lucky Day Whiskey Bar and small-batch gin specialists Graylynn. “We’re still a beef on weck and chicken wing town, and we’ve lived and died by that for a long time.”
Stevens is among the many “boomerangs” who have returned home after years away to open businesses in Buffalo, lured by affordable rents and, beyond that, the opportunity to own their own real estate.
Compared with larger American cities, commercial rents are still relatively affordable in Buffalo: The average retail rent there is $14.40 per square foot, versus $46.50 in the New York City metro area, with a 2% higher vacancy rate, according to a third-quarter 2025 market report from commercial real estate specialists CoStar Group, provided by Michael Scheid, a broker at Hunt Commercial Real Estate. This lower cost has enticed many native Buffalo chefs to return home to open restaurants.
Jill Colella managed the Rustica Bakery in Minneapolis before coming back to Buffalo post-pandemic with her business and life partner, Stephen Horton. The two opened Miller’s Thumb Bakery & Café in Tonawanda, on Buffalo’s north side, in 2022. “We looked into the startup costs when we were still living in Minneapolis, and it would not have been viable for us to purchase real estate, and there would’ve been too much competition,” she says.
At Miller’s Thumb, Horton mills his bread flour on premises from local grains and offers a variety of hearty sourdough breads, bagels, sweet rolls and pastries. Colella says sales have exceeded initial projections; revenue is already up 10% from 2024, with average customer spends increasing from $14 to $19.
“Those of us who lived elsewhere and came back, we wanted some of what we had in bigger cities to be available here,” says Colleen Stillwell, a Buffalo native who made pastry at the New York fine-dining institution Daniel before returning to open Butter Block, in 2015. Her bakery, in the Five Points neighborhood, runs the gamut from fine French pastries such as kouign amann to whimsical pop tarts in flavors like birthday cake and matcha cherry.
In the past five years, several of the city’s top restaurants and chefs have been James Beard Award finalists, a first for Buffalo. Among them is Ryan Fernandez in the best chef New York state category, for his restaurant Southern Junction, which offers Texas barbecue with Keralan Indian twists. (Disclosure: I’m a former member of the James Beard Award subcommittee for the foundation’s restaurant and chef awards.) Southern Junction was also listed in the top 50 barbecue restaurants outside of Texas last year by Texas Monthly, recognized for its singular fusion dishes including brisket biryani, beef barbacurry (his take on barbacoa, accented with garam masala) and cardamom cornbread.
“This being a smaller market, if you’re doing something different, you’re going to get noticed much sooner,” says Fernandez, who moved to Texas from Kerala with his family when he was 14 years old. He relocated to Buffalo eight years ago and sold takeout barbecue out of an incubator space, before moving the business to its current location in 2023. “If I did the same thing in Dallas, I would’ve ended up starting out in a strip mall, and I would’ve owed a lot of people a lot of money.”
The eclectic menu at Southern Junction signifies how shifting demographics in Buffalo’s population are diversifying the city’s foodways. “Buffalo is one of the rare cities in New York state that actually experienced a population increase in the last 10 years entirely due to immigrants coming in,” says Andrew Galarneau, former restaurant critic for the Buffalo News who publishes Four Bites, a newsletter chronicling the city’s rapidly evolving dining scene. According to the most recent census, the city’s population increased by 6.5%, rising for the first time since 1950 and the most of any city in upstate New York.
New food halls International House and West Side Bazaar have provided opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurs to develop businesses that showcase their native cuisines such as Egyptian, Afghan and Filipino. “The neighborhood place to get something to eat used to be the corner bar, where you could get some wings or weck or a cup of chili,” Galarneau says. “Now the corner places are Bangladeshi and Yemeni, and the food options are much more diverse.”
Catering to an audience of adventurous diners has empowered local chefs and restaurateurs to open more ambitious concepts. Rita DiTondo returned to Buffalo six years ago with her husband, chef Fabio Consonni, to take over her family’s restaurant DiTondo’s, which was established in 1904. When the couple reopened the renovated restaurant as DiTondo in late 2021, they introduced a new menu of regional Italian specialties including spezzatino all’uva, a dish of Molise-style braised pork shoulder with grapes. DiTondo says these changes likely couldn’t have happened 20 years ago.
But there’s a question of whether Buffalo’s food scene can continue to thrive and expand and whether the current administration’s immigration enforcement may stifle some of the international culinary impetus. “I hope immigrants keep settling in Buffalo and opening restaurants,” Galarneau says, citing the German settlers who once transformed Buffalo’s food scene with their horseradish-laced roast beef sandwiches. “So far it’s working spectacularly for the eaters of Buffalo.”