Best Chicken Parm in Buffalo, NY

Chicken parm in Buffalo, NY: our top picks

Buffalo’s Italian-American story starts on the West Side, where the city’s Italian street festival began on Connecticut Street in 1976. As Italian families moved north in the 1970s and 1980s, the festival followed them to Hertel Avenue in North Buffalo in the late 1980s, and that stretch of bakeries, cafes and red-sauce rooms is what locals now call Little Italy. The festival spent a few summers at the Outer Harbor and in Niagara Square and has since come home. Romeo & Juliet’s, a bakery and cafe on Hertel since 1998, is the stop for cannoli on the walk back to the car.

The red-sauce institution everyone mentions is downtown, though. Chef’s has been on the corner of Seneca and Chicago streets since 1923, and the Billittier family has run it since the 1940s, now into a third generation. Its spaghetti parm, pasta baked under layers of cheese, dates to 1962, when Lou Billittier Sr. worked it out with WKBW anchor Dave Thomas, and it is still the restaurant’s top seller.

South of the city the history gets bigger, literally. Ilio DiPaolo was born in Abruzzo and wrestled professionally across Canada, the U.S. and Japan until an ankle injury ended his career in 1965, the same year he went into the restaurant business; his place on South Park Avenue in Blasdell still has his championship belts and old ring photos on the walls. Nearby in Lackawanna, chef Joe Jerge opened The Mulberry Italian Ristorante in 2005 on a quiet residential street, and its meatballs have since brought Guy Fieri to town. In a city that takes its chicken wings this seriously, a soggy cutlet does not last long.

1. The Italian Village (Depew) — Parm Score 83. Chicken parm comes up in 1 of the recent Google reviews we sampled, and the tone is positive. It is on the menu, too. 4.5 on Google across 1,442 reviews.
2. DiVito's (Buffalo) — Parm Score 77. Chicken parm comes up in 1 of the recent Google reviews we sampled, and the tone is positive. It is on the menu, too. 4.7 on Google across 76 reviews.
3. Santasiero's Italian Restaurant (Buffalo) — Parm Score 75. Chicken parm comes up in 2 of the recent Google reviews we sampled, and the tone is positive. 4.2 on Google across 1,077 reviews.

We ranked 21 restaurants within 10 miles of Buffalo, NY. 8 of them have the parm confirmed, by reviewers or on their own menu, and Parm Scores run from 53 to 83. Confirmed places rank first; the rest are well-reviewed Italian spots where the parm is not yet confirmed, and pizzerias and steakhouses need a mention to appear at all. How Parm Score works.

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