Review: At Waxlight Bar a Vin, a delicious, thoughtful antidote to the Buffalo blues

Wondering if Buffalo can have nice things? This crew has answers, starting at $4

Waxlight gives me hope for the future, as in: I hope these chicken nuggets with ’nduja return to Waxlight in my lifetime.

In the days since another promising Buffalo Bills season ended in disappointment, I’ve been hearing the traditional folksong of the Buffalo people once again. The Buffalo blues goes like this: “Why can’t we have nice things?”

Fans suffering from crushed dreams have my sympathies. As something of a heretic on Buffalo sports fandom, my heart was marked safe from falling hopes. A decade ago, I switched my rooting energies to Buffalo’s kitchen teams. (See “My Name Is Andrew, and I’m a Buffaholic,” published in 2016).

There are winners and losers in the restaurant game too, and plenty of ways to get abused by officials. But you have much better chances of spending $200 on entertainment and ending the night happy with the ending.

Especially at places like Waxlight Bar a Vin. Six years along, the Black Rock restaurant has a three-year streak in James Beard Awards, the national restaurant honors that include the entire nation. (Michelin stars are more famous, but its inspectors only visit 11 communities in the United States.)

Ricotta toast has just-baked freshness, fresh cheese, and fresh herbs, at Waxlight

Waxlight’s Beard honors, including its top-five finish in 2024, are in the “Outstanding Wine and Beverage Program” category. A name that’s somewhat misleading, judging from a friend’s response: “That’s nice, but I’m not much of a wine connoisseur.”

In fact, the award category is for how the restaurant’s food can be paired with its beverages, encompassing elements of food, drink, and the expert service required to help people see stars.

Jessica Railey Forster, Waxlight’s main wine whisperer, is a certified second-level sommelier. She can find you a new favorite vintage. Tony Rials, lowkey cocktail wizard, creates cocktails you slow down to sip and ponder. He also fashions housemade syrups for a flat-out fun array of sodas and other ethanol-free drinks. (Current lineup ($9): limeade, pineapple daiquiri, basil and fenne, berry and ginger, passionfruit and black tea, bitter carrot.)

Clockwise from left: Tony Rials’ lineup of shockingly tasty ethanol-free drinks changes frequently. Peach tea and tonic, hibiscus lemonade, blueberry and ginger, pineapple dacquiri, center. (2024)

Joseph Fenush and Edward Forster delight in presenting specialties from around the globe to Buffalo diners. Theirs are the only menus that always make me learn something, making understanding what’s for dinner at Waxlight its own culinary seminar.

Where googling fails, servers double as teaching assistants: If they can’t answer your question, they’ll get the answer. Lauren Romanillos, who joined Waxlight ownership last year, leads the ever-so-patient server brigade.

Adventure comes in small packages here, with a flight of two-bite excursions staring at $4.

Bacon rillette on crispy brioche, gilded with black quince, and aged mimolette cheese. Or a Glidden Point oyster, accented with Pink Lady apple and horseradish granita. Crab and cheddar rarebit on toast is all of $4.50.

Potato chips coated with roast chicken dust ($7) invites add-ons ($13) from three culinary canons: chicken liver mousse (France), salted plum (Japan), mushrooms en escabeche (Spain, Latin America).

Golden pickled egg, smoked fish, tikka masala ($6) features soft-boiled eggs pickled with golden beets and fresh turmeric for color, and koji rice for texture. Its dab of smoked fish salad is touched with masala sauce and radish, for a miniature ode to British kedgeree.

Crispy chicken nuggets ($12), get housemade Sir Larry’s HP sauce, named after the British condiment and the current cat-in-residence at 10 Downing St. Deeper, darker, more complex than ketchup, Waxlight’s includes several fermented honeys, apples, salt-preserved plums, pickled daikon, tamarind, chile, and a few other things.

Single-bite lamb-stuffed arancini with shawarma sauces, Waxlight

While housemade pasta is a standard at fine-ish restaurants, Waxlight’s are anything but ordinary. Grano arso creste di gallo, ham hock, broccoli rabe, smoked mozzarella ($30) is cockscomb-patterned pasta honoring an Italian Puglian specialty.

Grano arso, “burnt grain,” comes from what peasants could scavenge after fields of post-harvest stubble were torched to prepare for next season. Ground, the grains had a smoky, darker flavor. Waxlight toasts and grinds its own grain, no landscape harmed, then surrounds the noodles with more fire-touched partners.

Coulotte steak, quinoa, summer squash, Waxlight

Big plates focus on premium ingredients and time-honored flavor combinations. Cassoulet ($36 with white beans, toulouse sausage, and pork shoulder, channels French bistro. Iberico pork collar pastrami ($46), with crispy potato, half sour pickles, and mustard jus, straddles kosher-style deli and Madrid tapas bar.

Faroe island salmon ($40), arrives on quinoa and cabbage, accented with Ashmead’s Kernel apples, a rare old-school variety with more intense, complex flavor, sourced from a midstate farm.

Even if you only want dessert and coffee at the bar, Waxlight will make it worth the schlep.

Paris-Brest pastry with pistachio whipped cream at Waxlight

Coffee includes Tipico single-origin espresso – most recently Cafe Pulcal, Guatemala – at $5 per double shot. Canelé de bordeaux, eggy caramelized puddings with hearts of vanilla and rum ($4), make able partners.

Choux au craquelin, maple custard ice cream ($11) demonstrates the pastry skills that can produce streaks of Paris-Brests and other French pastry royalty. Basque cheesecake ($11) does for cheesecake what creme brulee does for custard, turning up roofed in burnt sugar skin the color of espresso.

Waxlight’s chocolate dessert has celebrated Olive & Sinclair, a small-batch producer in Nashville, since the early days. Its current form is gelato ($11), adorned with bee pollen, white chocolate, and cocoa nib caramel.

Make reservations via computer, because there’s no phone. There is plenty of parking, though.

Dinner at Waxlight is an antidote to the Buffalo blues, that creeping feeling that the Queen City of the Great Lakes will never be best at anything. Offering delicious proof that Buffalo and the world around it are more amazing than you knew, Waxlight shines bright.