Buffalo wings are, like Eastern NC barebecue, a particular dish, not a regional cuisine unto themselves, and are the only necessarily spicy food I can think of from western NY./QUOTE]
For a city of its size, Buffalo has a lot of distinctive local cuisine. Wings are about as spicy as it gets, although the local Italian cuisine tends to be fairly authentic, even though Southern Italian red-sauce-and-red-checkered-tablecloths predominates.
Beef on Weck: meh. Roast beef on buns sprinkled in road salt.
Catholic-style haddock fish sty: pretty bland, but great comfort food.
Buffalo-style pizza: thick, with a very sweet sauce and Margherita pepperoni, usually sliced thicker than what’s typically seen. Not really spicy.
Sponge candy: not spicy.
Loganberry juice: not spicy.
Still, I’m not one who believes that “Americans like bland food.” Yeah, comfort food from the 1950s and 1960s left a lot to be desired, but meat-and-three really isn’t the dominant cuisine anymore.
[aside] Why are we using the rather pejorative “bland” to describe food that is not spicy? What’s wrong with “subtly flavoured” (apart from the British spelling, smart arses)?
There seems to be an assumption in this thread that more is better when it comes to spiciness. French food isn’t spicy. Is it bland?
Non-spicy food from Europe is “subtly flavored”, and therefore good.
Non-spicy food from the United States is “bland”, and therefore bad.
I’ve seen the double-standard quite a bit. If candy from the US is sweeter than that in Europe, it’s considered bad because it’s not sophisticated, subtle and nuanced. If chocolate isn’t as sweet as what Europeans enjoy, it’s because Americans can’t handle intense flavors.
Meh? I gotta say, as much as I love Buffalo wings, when I visited Buffalo, I discovered the best local cuisine was actually the beef-on-weck. Charlie the Butcher’s was awesome. Wonderful, clean, perfect flavors. It’s the best roast beef I’ve ever had anywhere. And, if you consider horseradish spicy (I don’t–it’s a different type of hotness to me), you got that with beef-on-weck, if you want.