John Young Stakes His Claim to the Chicken Wing
Published February 6, 1996 by the Buffalo News newspaper, https://buffalonews.com/

No one knows for sure who invented the wheel.
No one knows who invented the clothespin.

And no one is 100 percent sure who came up with the Buffalo chicken wing, either. Some great inventions have a tendency to remain anonymous.

Of all the inventions in the world, however, a recipe's origin may be the most difficult to trace. There's no great Culinary Court of Last Resort to make a theory official.

Many people believe the wing was invented in Buffalo's Anchor Bar late on a Friday night by the late Teressa Bellissimo.

But there is at least one other story.

"I am the true inventor of the Buffalo chicken wing," insists John Young, a soft-spoken, courtly gentleman who lives with his wife of 38 years, Christine, on the city's East Side.

Young admits that Teressa Bellissimo was the first person to cut the wings in half before frying and the first to serve them with celery and blue cheese dressing. But the original concept, he says, was his.

"It hurts me so bad that other people take the credit."

True, John Young has received precious little notice in the past 30-some years.

Despite some mentions in the famous Calvin Trillin New Yorker magazine piece in 1980, despite a proclamation from the Common Council on April 12, 1982, crediting him as the originator, few official sources mention Young's part in the wing epic that has seen the skinny chicken parts become a staple snack all over the United States.

Wings turn up in such places as Osaka, Japan, and Sydney, Australia, too. Often -- but not always halved -- and served with blue cheese dressing and celery.

Young, 62, says he has been selling chicken wings since 1963. He operated various restaurants in the area. But in 1964, he opened Wings and Things at 1313 Jefferson Ave. at Utica -- "it should be a historical site."

That restaurant made a sensation.

"The day we opened, people fell out of the sky!" Young says. "I was selling 10 wings -- whole -- for $1 then, and people were lined up around the corner like they were going to a rummage sale.

"And I had only three deep fryers."

John Young knew quite a lot about chicken wings by the time he came to Buffalo in 1948. He was 13 years old, had been born and raised on a four-acre Alabama farm, one of 14 children. And wings had been an important aspect of poor people's diet in the South since before the Civil War.

"The Black Family Dinner Quilt Cookbook" (Wimmer House), compiled by Dorothy Height and the National Council of Negro Women Inc., speaks of "the pigs' feet, intestines or chitterlings, jowls and ribs, chicken feet, necks, backs, wings and organ meats" that slaves were forced to cook with.

"The skill which made such leftover odds and ends the nourishment for hard laborers is a unique distinction of soul food," the book continues. "Slaves cooked with their whole heart, doing their best with sparse ingredients."

When Young was a boy, the food situation was tight. "We raised all our own chickens and pigs," he recalls.

"But we children seldom got the top-shelf cuts. My mother was very religious -- the breast and the thighs went to the preacher."

Once he came north, Young started work at the old Colonial House restaurant chain and with small restaurants of his own.

But then he talked with a boxer named Sam Anderson who traveled a lot. And the rest is culinary history.

"He told me that there was a restaurant in Washington, D.C., that was doing a good business with wings," Young says.

"And I decided to specialize."

Those were the glory days. Eventually, Young was serving up wings from five different locations. Celebrities came to to see him -- everyone from the Buffalo Bills' Cookie Gilchrist to George "Hound Dog" Lorenz watched Young dip the uncut wings in Golden Dip breading to protect them as they fried.

He used no butter -- just the famous (and forever secret) Mambo Sauce, which he kept boiling on the stove like a "pot of lava."

It is a tomato-based sauce that Young describes as "highly seasoned" rather than "merely hot." But there are other adjectives.

"The lip-smacking, liver-quivering sauce (that) titillated our taste buds down to our toes," said Council President James W. Pitts. (Pitts remembers going to Wings and Things after a Friday night session in the Dellwood Ballroom.)

No longer in the restaurant business, Young still thinks of bottling the sauce. Why?

"Anybody can do wings, but if you don't have the Mambo Sauce, you don't have anything."

Young left town in 1970, returned, then left again. "My brother Paul carried on the family tradition, and still does at a place called A Meal for a Steal at the corner of Jefferson and Ferry."

Meantime, of course, the Buffalo chicken wing took off. And so did confusion. Ivano Toscani, manager of the Anchor Bar, insists that the wings were invented and first served by the Bellissimo family in the Anchor Bar in 1964.

"Teressa used to keep wings on hand to make stock, and this time they were larger than usual so she thought they were too beautiful to waste. She chopped off the tip and cut them in half and fried them and served them with sauce, with celery," Toscani says. "I don't know whether there was blue cheese dressing then, however."

Young, on the other hand, insists that the place didn't serve wings regularly until 1974.

There's no question who gets most of the credit in the annals of culinary history, however.

"Mrs. Pataki (New York's first lady) just recognized us as the birthplace of the Buffalo chicken wing," Toscani pointed out. And even John Mariani, in his "Dictionary of American Food and Drink," gives credence to the Anchor Bar story.

Who will ever know the whole story? Don Will of Will Poultry remembers selling wings to Young in the '60s, but "I couldn't guess the quantities," he says. (Young has records that say there were a lot of them.)

And attorney Robert J. Tronolone, who has known the family for 18 years, says there is no doubt that Young was selling wings in the early '60s -- "but whether they were 'Buffalo style,' we'll never know."

Meantime, Young continues to speak up.

"I have eight grandchildren and I want their respect," he says firmly. "I want them to know what their grandfather did."

 

Family stakes John Young's claim as the originator of the Buffalo wing
from https://www.wkbw.com/, By: Madison Carter, Posted at 7:14 PM, Jan 31, 2020

Many have heard stories about how the Buffalo wing came to exist.

But, few have heard this version of events.

“It’s like with anything…you can start something. You can make something. But, if you don’t patent it, then people can take it even if people know that you started it.”

John Young moved to Buffalo when he was 13-years-old.

In 1958 he was married to his wife Christine Young, and they would go on to have three children together.

“My husband before we really got too serious, he asked me if I would go in business with him.”

At the time the Young’s were married, John was working at Bethlehem Steel, and then later American Radiator. Eventually, he left that job in 1962 and decided to go into business for himself.

He bought a property in Buffalo at the corners of Jefferson and Carlton.

While he was in business there, his daughter said a boxer named Sam Anderson told him about a person in Washington D.C. that was selling chicken wings and told him that’s what he should do.

“It was hard work, it was hard work, but after a length of time it was a good income,” said Christine Young.

He started selling the whole wing. Which — at the time — was a part of the chicken that many threw away or only used to make stock.

In a hand-written biography he left for his daughter Lina Brown-Young entitled: Biography of a Man Born With a Vision, Young said “that’s when chicken wings was born in Buffalo NY”.

Young moved the business up the street to Jefferson and High and then a few years later to Jefferson and Utica where he then realized “sauce is boss.”

Mombo sauce was brought to Buffalo.

He wrote: “The first day I opened the doors, I realized I had created a monster. People came from everywhere in droves to try the wings with the mombo sauce.”

Mombo sauce is a tomato-based sauce with a mixture of spices and seasonings.

After traveling some and spending time in the Bahamas, Young updated his recipe and tried to change it to Bahama Mama sauce, but the name wouldn’t stick.

During this time, his wife Christine said he had a number of friends and associates he would spend time with including Frank Bellissimo.

“He used to get together as some business men after hours would be talking and carrying on,” said Christine. “I know Frank used to visit my husband in the restaurant business, and I know that was before Frank started selling chicken wings.”

Bellissimo would go on to trademark the Buffalo wing with his wife Teresa years later under the Anchor Bar.

In the 1970s Young was forced to leave Buffalo with his family and moved to Deatur, Illinois.

Violence and other social factors played a role in the decision to leave Buffalo, but Young didn’t abandon his restaurant entrepreneurship.

“We moved to Illinois and he did good there with his business and he got like a little fleet of trucks,” said Christine.

But, back in Buffalo, the chicken wing business continued to boom.

The Young’s eventually returned.

“When they came back people were selling split wings, and bleu cheese and that kind of thing,” said his daughter Lina Brown-Young. “Which my father considered ‘tampering’ with the wings because he started selling whole wings, that was the original way wings were sold in Buffalo.”

John Young’s Wings n’ Things is still widely-regarded as the original Buffalo wing by those who were around at the time.

The Young family says the lack of marketing and the failure to secure a trademark is the reason John Young’s name is not recorded as the originator of the wing today.

“In hindsight, if he would have patented it we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but many people who know the history of Buffalo know who was selling wings first,” said Brown-Young.

“But, I will say, until he passed, that was something he was going downtown about about — people weren’t necessarily trying to take sides but in the same way they were. Because if you ask right now they’re going to say ‘Frank and Theresa’ and that is taking a side as opposed to saying ‘they claim’”.