It's easy to view the Buffalo wing as a quintessentially American food. But overseas markets are getting a taste of this spicy Western New York creation, and more are on the way to locales across the globe.

One chain eying diners abroad is Richardson, Texas-based Wingstop. It currently has 18 shops in Mexico, with others in the works for Russia and Singapore. The company's president and CEO, Charlie Morrison, wants his Buffalo wings on your plate no matter where you are.

He's banking on an aggressive expansion plan to make this happen. The wing seller he oversees opened in 1994, and it currently has 580 restaurants. Five years from now, Morrison wants 1,000, a number he says is well within reach.

"We're trying to get that perception that it's just an appetizer out of people's minds," he says. Asked whether Wingstop will have an international presence as big as in the U.S. — currently it's in 32 states — he doesn't hesitate: "Absolutely, if not more international than domestic."

International markets targeted

Other wing sellers are targeting international markets as well. Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD) is in Canada and has franchise development agreements for the Middle East and Puerto Rico (technically an unincorporated territory of the U.S.). The much smaller Wing Zone has overseas locations including Panama, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

Nowadays, wings are regularly found on casual dining menus; From Pizza Hut, Domino's (DPZ) and Papa John's (PZZA), to T.G.I. Friday's and Chili's, to individually owned bars, you can, if you choose, eat wings every day.

If you did so today, July 29, it might be particularly fitting, as it's National Chicken Wing Day. Many special days, weeks or months exist to raise awareness of a host of topics, so it's little surprise that wings get their own designation. The day was decreed in 1977 by then-mayor of Buffalo Stanley Makowski.

The most popular time of the year to eat wings isn't mid-summer, though; it's around the Super Bowl. Heading into this year's installment, the forecast was that 1.23 billion wing segments would be eaten that weekend. "[Super Bowl day] really should be National Chicken Wing Day," Morrison says.

Wingstop, owned by private equity firm Roark Capital Group, has become one of the largest U.S. chains dedicated to the wing. Buffalo Wild Wings, which operates wing-selling sports bars, had 891 locations at the end of 2012, while Wing Zone has 57 domestic outlets. The Wings Over … chain has 33 shops, focusing its attention on college towns.

Domestically, Wingstop is targeting major cities, looking to expand in markets such as Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. As for Buffalo proper, however, that's a no.