Laramie’s Chicken Wings Food Truck Tailgates At Every Buffalo Bills Game

Weitzel’s Wings, aka Double Dubs, has doubled down on its Wyoming-to-Buffalo connection.

The Laramie-based chicken joint on wheels is tailgating Buffalo Bills football games this season — home and road — to make sure the Bills rabid fanbase, known as “Bills Mafia,” gets their favorite wings prior to kickoff.

Owner Trent Weitzel of Laramie began his relationship with the Bills when he met his wife, Carrie. Carrie is from Webster, originally, a suburb of Rochester in western New York where they all bleed Buffalo blue. Carrie has been a long-suffering fan through the lean years, which is to say all of them. 

Four straight trips to the Super Bowl in the early 1990s. No team has ever done that. Four straight losses too. No one has done that, either.

Married Into The Mafia

Weitzel married into the Mafia in 2017, the same year Wyoming Cowboys quarterback Josh Allen was drafted by the Bills in the first round of the NFL Draft. The Bills got their man, Laramie native Weitzel got the girl. Bonds cemented and wedded, the rest is sauce on the wing.

“She’s a been a Bills fan since the Jim Kelly era. Her family has been Bills fans forever,” Weitzel said. “As soon as Josh became quarterback for the Bills, it all fell into place. We’ve been to several games since.”

Going to Bills games now means Weitzel is on the job, head man on the fryer in the back of the truck. Tailgating at Bills games is a scene like no other, and the Mafia is picky about their wings. After all, Buffalo, New York, is the unofficial wing capital of the world.

Like peaches in Georgia and pecans in Texas, wings are the thing of Buffalo.

It’s extra pressure on a guy from Wyoming, but Weitzel said he is practically a “made man” with Bills Mafia at this point.

“We are already on the map. We are not really concerned about that anymore. We are pretty well-known in the chicken wing world at this point,” Weitzel assured.

Double Dubs: They Give You Wings

Getting to be wing king began in 2007, when Weitzel started frying up treats at backyard parties and local barbeques. By 2013, he had his first food truck and was on his way to three more with a crew (dubbed “Dubs Mafia”) of two dozen employees, slinging wings at various mobile locations throughout Wyoming.

Two thumbs up jump-started Weitzel’s Wings to stardom. One was Food Network’s Guy Fieri, who featured Double Dubs in a 2022 segment of his show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”

After that show aired, Weitzel had to practically double his orders of ingredients everywhere he goes. More wings, gallons of his eight secret sauces, and barrels and barrels of fresh oil.

Into The Big Leagues

But the initial push came from a little-known college football player at the time who made routine snack runs to his mobile chicken shack in Laramie while playing for the University of Wyoming.

Josh Allen, a frontrunner for the NFL’s MVP this year, was a regular at Double Dubs back in the day. Weitzel was low key about it. Grandma talked his ear off.

“I watched him play a lot while he was a Cowboy. What he did at UW was amazing. But I am a humble guy. I always keep it pretty real,” the decidedly un-starstruck Weitzel said. “My grandmother, on the other hand, always chatted it up with him at the window. She is 88 years old and knows all his stats — college and pro.”

For years, Weitzel tried — unsuccessfully — to even gain entry to the National Buffalo Wing Festival, the Super Bowl of winged things.

Organizers of the annual event, including its founder Wing King Drew Cerza, penalized Weitzel for not having a brick-and-mortar restaurant and, well, Wyoming was not exactly the wingiest place in the work. Windiest, yes, but not wingiest.

Finally, Weitzel played his ace card. He dropped Allen’s name.

Weitzel’s basic pitch was: Our wings are good enough for Josh Allen. Maybe you’ve heard of him? He loved it when he went to school here.

Cerza was about half-swayed. Maybe they’re bluffing.

Then his phone rings like five minutes later. It’s Josh, vouching for “his boys out there in Wyoming.”

Winning Road Team

Double Dubs rumbled its wheeled wing bistro 22 hours eastbound, across seven states and two time zones, and dominated.

“After that first trip, my product spoke for itself,” Weitzel said.

Now Cerza can’t keep Double Dubs out of the competition, or off the podium.

Weitzel’s was the first food truck business to compete in the prestigious event. He took home first prize on his first try in the traditional medium buffalo sauce category — a coveted Holy Grail of Buffalo wings.

Since then, Weitzel’s Wings wins armfuls of trophies every year. For two years running now they’ve been crowned People’s Choice winner, judged by who sells the most wings at the festival. No business has ever won three times.

“I've experimented myself. I’ve tasted a lot of wings from Kansas City to Buffalo and all over the country. My wings are better,” Weitzel said. “I don't want to toot my own horn, but [wings in Buffalo] are supposed to be the best in the country, and we go out there and run all over them.”

Game Time

Not one to bask in his accomplishments for too long, Weitzel has most recently been rolling his trucks to Bills games, the ultimate Buffalo wings doing some ultimate tailgating.

Double Dubs was just at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City for the Bills-Chiefs game last week. He’s in Buffalo this Sunday for the Cowboys-Bills game.

Tailgating brings in some revenue — they sell about 1,000 wings a game — but the exposure is what Weitzel is after.

“A lot of it is the marketing. I love the atmosphere and to keep in peoples’ eyes,” he said. “It’s also fun to go to the games and hear Josh calling out the plays down on the field. I would know his voice anywhere.”

The tailgating thing all got started last year when Weitzel’s networking efforts paid off. Word got to the head of GameDay Hospitality, a company that organizes the official pregame tailgate scene at all Bills home and away games.

GameDay added Double Dubs to its approved vendor list, then their first game almost didn’t happen.

An historic blizzard grounded everything in Buffalo that year. Cleveland was no better. The game was eventually shifted to a neutral site in Detroit, so that’s where Weitzel’s wing wagon went.

Double Dubs’ second game was the Bills-Giants game in Buffalo on Oct. 15. Last weekend was the third game Dubs has done. There are plans for more, including non-Bills games one day.

“We weren’t planning on this tailgate [Cowboys-Bills this weekend] until Monday when we get a phone call from GameDay,” Weitzels said. “They say they are taping an MTV reality TV show segment (for ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Road Rules’), and they really wanted us there.”

Two States With Buffalos

Weitzel’s kids, Kadyn and Thor, as well as most of his 20-somethig employees are all diehard de facto Bills fans these days.

The wing king of Wyoming still stays in touch with Allen, even if it is mostly through social media where the two will congratulate each other on their latest accomplishments.

“When we were in Buffalo last September, Josh got a hold of us and made a personal wing order. Normally we make him about 200 of his favorite — No. 17 Spicy Bleu — but now that he is with Hailee [Steinfeld] he’ll mixes it up a little with different ones,” Weitzel said.

“When we are in LA in a couple weeks (Dec. 23 against the Chargers) hopefully we can meet her and her family and get to know them.”

The wings, the wife; they aren’t all that ties this Wyoming guy to Buffalo, New York. Three years ago, if Weitzel told his friends he was headed to Buffalo with the food truck they would have certainly assumed he meant the Buffalo in Johnson County, Wyoming.

“Wyoming and the Buffalo area ... I don't think people really realize how similar they are,” Weitzel said. “People super-friendly in that western New York area. It feels like here. It feels like home.”

Jake Nichols can be reached at: Jake@CowboyStateDaily.com

Jake Nichols can be reached at jake@cowboystatedaily.com.