It was 35 years ago when a fresh-faced former Princeton student posed for a photo in front of Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe and smiled big.
The young man, Lyle Menendez, then 22, had recently come into some money. A lot of money. And he loved the chicken wings at Chuck’s so much, he decided to buy the place in 1990 for $550,000.
He would take his local spot national, he told a Princeton newspaper at the time, to university towns from New Jersey to California. It would have a “Midwestern motif centered around health food and Buffalo wings,” he told the newspaper, Town Topics. He would later testify that at the time of his purchase, some family members thought he needed direction in his life and believed running this business could provide it. His parents had been brutally murdered months earlier.
He renamed the restaurant Mr. Buffalo’s. And he appointed a friend to help him run and expand what he thought would soon become a chicken-wing empire. “I would love to get the education,” he told Town Topics in explaining why he had withdrawn from Princeton. “But I can’t justify postponing my dreams.”
His big dreams for chicken wings fell apart when the authorities — and later the world — realized what he and his brother had done.
Lyle and Erik Menendez had marched into their home in Beverly Hills, Calif., and killed their father Jose and their mother Kitty, opening fire on them with shotguns. The authorities believed at the time that the brothers had been motivated by greed, knowing that killing their parents could allow them to access a $14 million estate. Lyle Menendez was taken into custody just a few weeks after he spoke to Town Topics. He ended up surrendering Mr. Buffalo’s.
Three decades later, the Menendez brothers could be on the path to freedom. On Friday, they will be in court in Los Angeles for a hearing on a pair of legal issues that need to be resolved before they proceed with their efforts to be resentenced. Their lives have been in flux as their cases have been in flux, with hearings, rulings, legal filings and new revelations in documentaries. They are older and heavier, wiser and more circumspect.
But at least one thing has remained more or less the same — the Jersey wing joint.
It’s still there, blocks from the campus of Princeton University. After Lyle walked away from Mr. Buffalo’s, the name of the restaurant was quickly changed back to Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe and sold to a man who soon sold it again when he fell into poor health.
The worn wooden bar — the place began as a bar long ago — is the same, just like the cafeteria seating at the front of the house. And, it seems, so is the paint job: pale yellow and tangerine orange with a strip of maroon running through the middle.
The building number — “16” — is still affixed atop the door as it was decades ago. A sign advertising the cafe’s offerings still hangs to the right. The script isn’t cursive written in chalk anymore, but the item at the top remains the big seller: “Buffalo wings.”
It is all more or less as it was when one of Michelle Kim’s aunts came to own the place. And it has been in the family for the last three decades or so. Ms. Kim and her husband, Kris Kim, 46, took it over after her aunt retired.
“We ask all the time, ‘Do you want us to change the interior in a more modern way?’” Ms. Kim, 53, said of her customers. “They say, ‘No, whenever I come here, it brings me nostalgia, a feeling of home.’”
There are no traces of the Menendez brothers inside the modest chicken shack in 2025. There are no posters for the NBC series that has scenes of Lyle eating inside a place that is supposed to be Chuck’s, and no posters for the Netflix series that opens with Lyle daydreaming about his plans for Mr. Buffalo’s.
“What TCBY did for yogurt, that is exactly what Mr. Buffalo is going to do for Buffalo wings,” the Lyle character says in the opening of the Netflix docudrama.
But history lingers. Javier Mendez, the cook who has been making the wings for 27 years, remembers when one member of the Menendez clan stopped by maybe 15 years ago. And Michelle and Kris Kim say they know why people stop to pose for photos outside their door without walking in to buy any wings. They are asked or told about the brothers almost every day.
“I watched the documentary, and a lot of customers have asked, ‘Is this the place from the Menendez brothers?’” Kris said. “That’s why we know about them. But we don’t know what the story is exactly.”
The relevant part goes like this: In August 1989, the brothers killed their parents. (They are buried at a cemetery steps from the cafe.) In the brief period between the killings and their arrest, Lyle and Erik went on a spending spree, buying an expensive car, a luxury watch — and, in Lyle’s case, Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe.
But the brothers quickly became suspects in the murders, and after a series of trials, they were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. They are back in the news now because of the public push to get them released, either through resentencing or clemency. The brothers have long said they killed their parents not out of greed, but out of a fear for their lives, acknowledging in open court that their father had sexually abused them.
Lawyers for the brothers did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
On a recent afternoon, customers who came by Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe had only faint awareness of the brothers and their ties to the place. Most were locals and regulars. Many said they had been coming since the days when the area had only a few reliable places to eat.
“The wings are consistent, especially when you come here and have them straight off the hopper,” said Mitra Kelly, 61, who is part of the academic support staff at Princeton and has been coming in once a month for the last 15 years. “I stick with what works.”
Nowadays, local burrata with grilled radicchio and kumquats is available for $17 on the manicured main street around the corner. But at Chuck’s, which is a little more tucked away, the Yankees game is on, a bulletin board is filled with community fliers and a customer’s anime decorates the walls. Here, 14 wings costs roughly the same as that hunk of local burrata.
“In Princeton, there are a lot of food places that come and go,” said Ben Newton, 40, who grew up in town and recently moved back. “This place is an institution.”
Mr. Newton was visiting on this afternoon with a ceramic version of a friend’s head, which he plopped on a table next to him. His father brought wings home on Sundays. And he and his friends came to Chuck’s all the time growing up, he said. Now one of those friends was celebrating a big birthday. So he had come to the restaurant to make the friend a video message in which he could present the surprise gift.
“When I need a feeling of home, this is where I come,” Mr. Newton said.
Business has been steady lately, though the Kims said Chuck’s enjoyed a brief spike in 2017.
The spike wasn’t an accident. It was Menendez-related. It happened right after “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders” debuted on NBC.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
