John Young Created Buffalo Wings
A disputed origin about spicy chicken wings through portraiture
A Beef Over Chicken In Buffalo
History of the Buffalo wing is far from settled. The wing’s origin is the source of a long-simmering dispute that is barely known outside Buffalo’s city limits — part of a very old story about who gets credit in America, and who doesn’t.
In 1964 the Bellissimos, owners of Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY, laid claim to inventing the Buffalo-style chicken wings that won international culinary respect and fame for their hometown.
Yet, if you ask a Black Buffalonian of a certain age who first got popular selling chicken wings in Buffalo, Anchor Bar is rarely mentioned.
About a mile east of Anchor Bar, restaurateur John Young (illustration) had been serving whole, breaded wings at events and multiple restaurants at one of the busiest spots on a bustling Jefferson Avenue that amounted to Black Main Street. The wings at John Young’s Wings and Things arrived with a spicy-tangy-sweet orange-red sauce called mombo sauce.
On Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side in the 1960s, John Young’s name meant wings, former City of Buffalo councilman James Pitts told USA TODAY Network. And you wouldn’t think of wings without thinking of John Young.
But by 1970, after riots and escalating racial tensions, Young moved away from a Buffalo he no longer considered safe. When he returned a decade later, he found a wing-crazy town that had given all credit to Anchor Bar.
Young went back into the wing business in Buffalo, and to any local newspaper who would listen, he told his story. He also told it to the New Yorker in 1980.
“I am the true inventor of the Buffalo chicken wing,” he told Buffalo News food critic Janice Okun in 1996, two years before his death. “It hurts me so bad that other people take the credit.”
Source, usatoday.com