Stinger Sub

The stinger is two sandwiches stuffed into the space of one. A Buffalo sub shop already makes a steak sub, shaved beef and melted cheese off the griddle, and it already makes a chicken-finger sub, breaded tenders drenched in hot sauce; the stinger is the decision to build both into the same roll and hand it over as a single order. Shaved steak on the bottom, a row of sauced fingers laid over it, cheese melting through the seam between them, then the cold deck of lettuce, tomato, onion, and a heavy stripe of blue cheese dressing. It is not a steak sub with chicken added or a finger sub with beef added. It is the full weight of each, asked to share a roll.

The blue cheese is doing more than seasoning. Frank's RedHot whisked into the fryer-hot tenders runs sharp and acidic, and the shaved beef brings its own rendered fat and salt; left alone the two would pull the bite in two loud directions at once. A thick course of blue cheese dressing sits between them as the cool, fatty, faintly funky middle that both sides land on, the same way the dressing tempers a plate of wings. Cut the dressing and the sandwich reads as heat stacked on grease with nothing to catch it. The roll has to be a Buffalo sub roll for the same reason a wing plate needs a fork: soft inside but baked with a top crust stiff enough to carry a wet, double-protein load to the last bite.

Order it once and the math of it is obvious. A steak sub is a meal. A chicken-finger sub is a meal. The stinger charges you for both and dares you to finish it. The portion is the joke and the appeal at the same time, which is why it reads as late-night food before it reads as lunch.

Everything that can go wrong goes wrong at the overload. Pile the fingers in straight from the fryer and the breading swells with sauce, slumps against the steak, and the whole core turns to a hot paste with no crunch left in it; the cooks who get it right drain the tenders and lay them so a few crusts ride above the beef. Skimp the cheese on the steak and the two proteins sit as separate cold piles that slide apart at the first squeeze. Use a roll with no spine and the bottom gives out under the grease halfway down, dropping beef and a finger back onto the wrapper. The fault line is always the same: a roll and a build asked to carry roughly double what a single sub carries.

It comes wrapped in foil that is already warm and heavy in the hand, and the first thing off it is hot sauce and seared beef fat at once, the cayenne and the griddle hitting together before the foil is even open. The fingers snap where the crust held and go soft where the sauce soaked, the steak gives shredded and slick under them, the blue cheese drags cool across the whole thing, and the cold onion cracks somewhere in the middle. Grease slicks the foil and the fingertips at the open end. It is too much sandwich, eaten leaning over the wrapper so what falls out lands on paper, and that overload is exactly what the order is for.

The stinger is its own small genre across Western New York, and the spinoffs keep the pairing while dropping the roll. Stinger fries put the same steak and sauced fingers over a tray of fries, stinger nachos run them over chips, a stinger wrap rolls them in a flour tortilla, and stinger pizza scatters both across a pie. None of those is the parent; they are the combo proven on the sub and then sent looking for new carriers. The plain chicken-finger sub and the plain steak sub it fuses are each ordered on their own every day, and both are written up on the site as the components this one welds together.

A Buffalo Invention of the 2000s

The stinger is recent and local, a Buffalo creation of the early-to-mid 2000s rather than an old regional dish. Its name is a portmanteau hiding in plain sight, fusing the steak and the chicken finger the way the sandwich fuses the subs, and the earliest dated trace of it in print is an October 2005 item in the Buffalo News describing a reader's stinger sub of steak and chicken fingers stuffed into a submarine roll, already in circulation by then.

Credit for it splits between two shops, and Buffalo has never decided. The loudest claim belongs to Jim's Steakout, the local sub chain founded on Elmwood Avenue in 1981 and open into the small hours, which is widely named as the originator and put the stinger firmly on its own menu in 2008; the build later landed on a national best-new-sandwiches list under the chain's name. A rival account points to Colosso Taco in nearby Tonawanda, attributing it to founder Dwight Jeeves. Neither is documented as first, and the fair reading is that the stinger surfaced across Buffalo's sub counters in those years rather than from any one provable kitchen.

What is not in dispute is the appetite that produced it. Buffalo already ran on hot-sauced fried chicken and on cheap, generous subs sold late, and the stinger is what happens when a kitchen stops choosing between its two best sellers and serves them welded together to people eating at one in the morning. Jim's Steakout still rings up stingers from counters open until five.