An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing
By Calvin Trillin, August 18, 1980, U. S. Journal, August 25, 1980 Issue, EXCERPT

Note: This article brought Buffalo Wings to national attention.

“I did not appreciate the difficulties historians must face regularly in the course of their research until I began trying to compile a short history of the Buffalo chicken wing. Since Buffalo chicken wings were invented less than twenty years ago, I had figured that I would have an easy task compared to, say, a medievalist whose specialty requires him to poke around in thirteenth-century Spain. Also, there is extant documentation identifying the inventor of Buffalo chicken wings as Frank Bellissimo, founder of the Anchor Bar, on Main Street—the form of the documentation being an official proclamation from the City of Buffalo declaring July 29, 1977, Chicken Wing Day.

. . . Fortunately,  the actual moment that Buffalo chicken wings were invented has been described by Frank Bellissimo and his son, Dom, with the sort of rich detail that any historian would value; unfortunately, they use different details. Frank Bellissimo is in his eighties now, and more or less retired; he and his wife, Teressa, are pretty much confined to an apartment above the Anchor Bar. According to the account he has given many times over the years, the invention of the Buffalo chicken wing came about because of a mistake—the delivery of some chicken wings instead of the backs and necks that were ordinarily used in making spaghetti sauce. Frank Bellissimo thought it was a shame to use the wings for sauce. “They were looking at you, like saying, ‘I don’t belong in the sauce,’ ” he has often recalled. He implored his wife, who was doing the cooking, to figure out some more dignified end for the wings. Teressa Bellissimo decided to make some hors d’oeuvres for the bar—and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

Dom Bellissimo—a short, effusive man who now acts as the bustling host of the Anchor Bar—tells a story that does not include a mistaken delivery or, for that matter, Frank Bellissimo. According to Dom, it was late on a Friday night in 1964, a time when Roman Catholics still confined themselves to fish and vegetables on Fridays. He was tending the bar. Some regulars had been spending a lot of money, and Dom asked his mother to make something special to pass around gratis at the stroke of midnight. Teressa Bellissimo picked up some chicken wings—parts of a chicken that most people do not consider even good enough to give away to barflies—and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

Dom and Frank agree that Teressa Bellissimo chopped each wing in half and served two straight sections that the regulars at the bar could eat with their fingers. (The two straight pieces, one of which looks like a miniature drumstick and is known locally as a drumette, became one of the major characteristics of the dish; in Buffalo, a plate of wings does not look like a plate of wings but like an order of fried chicken that has, for some reason, been reduced drastically in scale.) She “deep-fried” them, applied some hot sauce, and served them on a plate that included some celery from the Anchor Bar’s regular antipasto and some of the blue-cheese dressing normally used as the house dressing for salads. Dom and Frank also agree that the wings were an immediate success—famous throughout Buffalo within weeks.

Before long, they say, chicken wings were on the dinner menu instead of being served gratis at the bar—and were beginning to nudge aside the Italian food that had always been the Anchor Bar’s specialty. In the clipping libraries of the Buffalo newspapers, I could find only one article that dealt with the Bellissimo family and their restaurant in that period—a long piece on Frank and Teressa in the Courier-Express in 1969, five years after the invention of the chicken wing. It talks a lot about the musicians who had appeared at the Bellissimos’ restaurant over the years and about the entertainers who used to drop in after road shows. It mentions the custom Teressa and Frank had in times gone by of offering a few songs themselves late on Saturday night—Teressa emerging from the kitchen to belt out ‘‘Oh Marie” or “Tell Me That You Love Me.” It does not mention chicken wings. Perhaps the interviewer simply happened to be more interested in jazz drummers than tasty experiments. Perhaps Frank and Dom Bellissimo are, like most people, funny on dates.

On my last evening in Buffalo— . . . I met a man named John Young, who told me, “I am actually the creator of the wing.” Young, who is black, reminded me that black people have always eaten chicken wings. What he invented, he said, was the sauce that created Buffalo chicken wings—a special concoction he calls mambo sauce. He said that chicken wings in mambo sauce became his specialty in the middle sixties, and that he even registered the name of his restaurant, John Young’s Wings ’n Things, at the county courthouse before moving to Illinois, in 1970. “If the Anchor Bar was selling chicken wings, nobody in Buffalo knew it then,” Young said. “After I left here, everybody started chicken wings.” Young, who had returned to Buffalo a few months before our talk, told me that those who had copied the dish must be saying, “Oh, man! The original King of the Wings is back. He’s fixin’ to do a job on you.” In fact, Young said, he was pleased to see so many people in Buffalo make money off his invention—a magnanimous sentiment that I had also heard expressed by both Frank and Dom Bellissimo. “I could have formed a company and went across the country,” Young told me. “It’s still not too late.”

The wings Young invented were not chopped in half—a process he includes in the category of “tampering with them.” They were served breaded with the mambo sauce covering them. In John Young’s Wings ’n Things, as well as in a restaurant called Bird Land, run by Young’s brother Paul, they are still served that way—sometimes accompanied by the blue-cheese dressing and celery that were undoubtedly inspired by Teressa Bellissimo.

It is true, a local poultry distributor told me, that John Young as well as Frank Bellissimo started buying a lot of chicken wings in the middle sixties, but there is no reason for the distributor to have saved the sales receipts that might indicate who was first. First with what? Was the Buffalo chicken wing invented when Teressa Bellissimo thought of splitting it in half and deep-frying it and serving it with celery and blue-cheese dressing? Was it invented when John Young started using mambo sauce and thought of elevating wings into a specialty? How about the black people who have always eaten chicken wings? The way John Young talks, black people may have been eating chicken wings in thirteenth-century Spain. How is it that historians can fix the date of the Battle of the Boyne with such precision? How can they be so certain of its outcome?”