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Family of Buffalo Wings Creator John Young Claims He Never Got His Credit

Source: Smith Collection/Gado / Getty

An oft-repeated quote reads as follows: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” And according to the family of John Young, a late Black restaurant owner from Buffalo, NY, his name has been hidden far too long when it comes to the creation story of buffalo wings. However, they are now fighting for their deceased forefather to finally get his respect and be remembered as the true inventor of this worldwide delectable favorite.

“I am the true inventor of the Buffalo chicken wing,” Young told the Buffalo News in 1996, two years before his death. “It hurts me so bad that other people take the credit.” Young was born on a farm in Stockton, Alabama, in 1934. He was one of 14 children and moved north at 14 years old to The Nickel City searching for work.

In the early sixties, though, Young hit his stride in the restaurant business. “[A traveling boxer named Sam Anderson] told me that there was a restaurant in Washington, D.C., that was doing a good business with wings,” Young shared with Buffalo’s Janice Okun. “And I decided to specialize.”

Young tasted the D.C. recipe, called mumbo/mambo sauce, and then set up his own shop named “Wings and Things.” But a trip to Jamaica inspired him to add tropical fruits to his version, and that’s really when Young’s buffalo wings became a hit. “The first day I opened the doors, I realized I had created a monster,” he stated in a handwritten autobiography to his daughter Lina Brown-Young. “People came from everywhere in droves to try the wings with the mambo sauce.”

Everyone in Queen City, from the local politicos to the Buffalo Bills, trekked to Young’s spot searching for the wings, which were breaded and fried, then slathered in the tasty sauce but left uncut. “Anybody that was around back then will tell you that John Young was the originator,” said 74-year-old Theodore Clyburn in an interview with USA TODAY. Clyburn recalls his first visit to Wings and Things, located in the predominantly Black neighborhood of the area’s East Side, as far back as 1964.

Mounting racial tensions drove Young to leave Buffalo for his safety six years later. When he returned to the city in 1980, though, his popular treat was being credited to an eatery called Anchor Bar, owned by Italian immigrants Frank and Teressa Bellissimo. Their restaurant is located in a white area of Buffalo but only one mile away from where Wings and Things used to be.

According to the Bellissimos’ account, they came up with the recipe in 1964 when their son Dominic and some friends stumbled in on one Friday evening, and they needed something to munch on fast. As the story goes, the matriarch grabbed some nearby wings, which were generally reserved for stock and soups, and went in a different direction than usual.

Young’s daughter isn’t buying their version of the story, though. Although Anchor Bar is still touted as the birthplace of buffalo wings by many historians, she wants her father to have his name remembered, too. “They wouldn’t have dared claim they invented the wing while my father was still around,” she asserted. “They just wouldn’t.”

Two years ago, one Buffalonian learned about the Youngs’ contributions to the wing and decided he would bring them to light. Marc Moscato, the founder of Buffalo Bike Tours, reached out to everyone in town who had Young’s surname and luckily made contact with Brown-Young. She happily remade her father’s mambo sauce for Moscato’s ride, which he now offers on his tour rides through the city.

“Certainly the contribution to John Young to Buffalo history it is, I would say it is equally as important if not more important than the Anchor Bar,” Moscato told local station WGRZ. He even set up a GoFundMe page along with the Youngs and Michigan Street Corridor that aims to keep the story of John Young alive with a mural at the original Wings and Things location, and the artwork is scheduled to be completed in the spring of next year.

Photo: Smith Collection/Gado / Getty