In Buffalo City, the Buffalo Wing does not exist. Only wings. Wings were born in Buffalo, which is a universally recognized truth. 

Together with Rick James and Goo Goo Dolls, Heat Wing is Buffalo's most famous export product in the past 60 years. On Super Bowl Sunday alone, Americans with sticky fingers may pick the thinnest and most bone-in parts of the clean 1.4 billion chickens. 

The embryonic form of wings is now well-known to the sports bars in every university town, and they may also be a natural resource. There are fried crispy chicken wings, fried into chicken wings and chicken wings, which look like the limbs of a much smaller bird. Butter and Frank's red heat blend into the tolerance of each digestive tract. Celery of different freshness. A gentle fight between blue cheese and ranch. 

But the Buffalo wing is still new, dating back to the 1960s. Its history is far from certain. The origin of the wing is the root of a long-simmering dispute and is hardly known outside its city limits—it is part of an ancient story about who gains trust in the United States and who does not. 

In Buffalo, your perception of the origin of the wing may depend to a large extent on the town you grew up in.

On the one hand, this story spread all over the world. 

This involves a couple born in Italy, their names are Frank and Teresa Bellissimo, they are the perfect host to be in their decades-old Italian restaurant Anchor Bar is famous for singing and entertaining guests. The restaurant is located on the dividing line between the black and white sides of the quarantine area. buffalo. 

The way Bellissimos tells it, offering a portion of soup like wings is unthinkable before they think about it, and this idea is inspired by the kind of sudden and accidental inspiration that often appears in ancient fish stories about food sources. produced. In 1964, a version of their story was that their son Dominic arrived at Anchor Bar on a decisive Friday night with a group of friends who were hungry for new things. His mother readily made a snack from the materials at hand.

"They look like chicken wings and are part of chicken. They are usually put in a soup pot to make soup," the official history of the bar reads, posted on a placard outside the door. "Theresa fried her wings and seasoned them with a secret sauce. The wings were hit instantly."

Anchor Bar’s chicken wings with a spicy orange-red sauce spread throughout the town so quickly that in 1980, when writer Calvin Trillin recorded the city’s love for chicken wings in The New Yorker, Trillin’s Buffalo Luo friend could not imagine the era without chicken wings. Anchor Bar is now a multi-state franchise store. Bottled sauces are exported to Japan. It is very famous, and even Homer Simpson has visited it in cartoon form.  

However, if you ask a black Buffalo of a certain age who sold chicken wings for the first time in Buffalo, few people mention Anchor Bar.

The 74-year-old Theodore Clayburn said: “Anyone at the time would tell you that John Young was the founder.” Clayburn said that when he graduated from high school in 1964, he almost lived in the restaurant owner John On the spicy chicken wings made by Yang, this is one of the busiest places on the bustling Jefferson Avenue, which is equivalent to Black Avenue. 

According to Young’s daughter Lina Brown-Young, about 1 mile east of Anchor Bar, Young has been serving whole bread crumb wings at Jefferson events and restaurants since 1961 or even earlier. A former customer, and a customer of Young in the 1980s. And the 90s. 

Those early fans include 82-year-old Ron Duff, a member of the wings chain Duff's Famous Wings. He said that John Young’s wings were his favorite game time after Bills arrived in 1960-as early as he or Anchor Bar started to play Before the wings serve.

"They spent five cents. We used to buy a few hundred and take them to the game. So this is my first introduction, at least in 1961," Duff said. "They always sell a lot of wings in the black part." 

By the mid-1960s, a spicy and sweet orange-red sauce appeared on the wings of John Young's Wings and Things, called mombo sauce. Former Buffalo City Councilman James Pitts called it "smocking and trembling liver." The sauce (that) stimulates our taste buds down to our toes."

Pitts told USA Today that in the predominantly black East Side of Buffalo in the 1960s, John Young's name meant wings. If you don't think about John Young, you wouldn't think of wings. 

But by 1970, after riots and racial tensions escalated, Yang moved away from Buffalo, which he no longer considered safe. When he came back ten years later, he found a crazy town, and all the credit for this town went to Anchor Bar.

"When my father was still there, they dared not claim that they invented the wings," Brown-Young said. "They just don't want to."

Yang returned to the wing business in Buffalo and told his story to any local newspaper willing to listen. He also told the New Yorker about it in 1980. 

"I am the true inventor of Buffalo chicken wings," he told Buffalo News food critic Janice Okun in 1996, two years before his death. "It hurts me so much that everyone else gives credit to others."

Pitts said that Yang's story is not as well known as the Anchor Bar story, which is a historical mistake.

"If you talk about one of the hallmarks of Buffalo's cultural contribution to food and chicken wings, there is an African-American there-if it is a parallel situation, or some kind of linear development-he is doing this. East Side," Pitts said. "He is serving his community because he cannot enter any other community." 

Of course, Young did not invent the idea of ​​providing a plate of fried chicken wings. Neither does the Anchor Bar. And none of them invented the idea of ​​pouring wings in orange-red sauce. 

Chicken wings have a long tradition in African American food. The history of fried chicken wings from Anchor Bar is a bit like the history of rock from Elvis. 

According to food historian Adrian Miller, African-Americans in the South have provided whole fried chicken to their families for generations. He is "Soul Food: An Amazing Story of American Food, One at a Time" The author of "disk".

Miller said that at the fried chicken dinner on Sunday, visiting missionaries usually eat the best part of the fried chicken dinner, the "missionary part." The children in the bottom line often have wings. 

But the food you ate in childhood has a powerful attraction. By the 1950s and 1960s, during the postwar great migration, chicken wings began to appear as independent dishes in restaurants owned by northern blacks. 

John Young grew up on a farm in Alabama, was one of 14 children, and then came to Buffalo to work as a teenager. Except for the ribs, when Yang met a traveling boxer named Sam Anderson, he was already serving his wings. Anderson told him about takeaway restaurants in Washington, D.C., which make money by selling chicken wings coated in a rich sweet tomato sauce. 

Mumbo sauce, it is called. Sometimes "mambo" or "mengbo" or "mumble". In 1962, the oldest of these carryovers on record had the same name as the "Wings N Things" created by Yang shortly thereafter.

Even DC Wing Sauce, which is still popular in Chinese and black-owned restaurants, may have deeper roots. In the 1950s, the name was first fixed on Argia B’s Mumbo Sauce, which may be the most enduring example of Chicago’s old barbecue tradition, called mild sauce. 

When Young made his own mombo sauce—and finally added tropical fruits after visiting Jamaica—his wings flew.

"The first day I opened the door, I realized that I had created a monster," he wrote in his handwritten autobiography to his daughter. "People came in droves from all directions to try the chicken wings with mombo sauce."

Young brought up his wings whole and put $10 in a small cardboard container. He doesn't believe in "tampering" the wings by cutting them. Customer Theodore Clyburn recalled that in the southern tradition, he provided them with breadcrumbs and seasonings, so you could enjoy them without sauces.

"He would dip them in the sauce, so when they came out, they would smoke," Cliburn said. "And a lot of people like them that way. But I said,'John, don't keep them soaked. Just pick up the tongs and sprinkle mobo sauce on it.'"

According to reports, celebrities from Cookie Gilchrist of the Buffalo Bills to singers Joe Tex and Rick James are fans of these wings. 

But John Young's whole and breadcrumb wings are not what Buffalo is famous for. Historian Miller said that no matter how popular, in those days, food cooked in black-owned restaurants was rarely considered barbecue unless it was barbecue. 

As for Anchor Bar, why does it serve chicken wings with spicy red sauce? Teressa, Frank, and Dominic Bellissimo all died decades ago, but they have told many competing stories over the years.

According to the version Frank told The New Yorker in 1980, the wings were delivered in error. They actually want to order the back and neck to make pasta sauce. Frank asked his wife to use the wings they received to make "more dignified" snacks. 

Maybe before she came up with the idea herself, she complained about a wrong delivery all night. Or, these wings were ordered deliberately for inventory, and a batch of larger than usual wings made Teresa decide to supply them as snacks. 

"True story," Anchor Bar's current CEO Mark Dempsey said, citing the bar’s official history. "One night, Teresa and Frank worked in a restaurant with their son Dominic... and Dominic went back to the kitchen and asked his mother, you know Yes, create something different..."

Many people said that they participated in the first wings feast, they told their own version of the story, each version is a little different.

On the other hand, Youngs insists that no epiphany or surprise is needed: Bellissimos knows the wings because John Young is serving a crowd a mile away.  

Yang's widow, Christine, told the Southern Law Review that she remembered Frank Bellissimo coming to the restaurant a few hours later and was taken aback by the wings Yang provided. Pitts said Bellissimo was coming to a dinner party, and Young was the host.

"I don't know how many times my father said that the person who owned the Anchor Bar at that time went to his restaurant and had his wings," Brown-Young said.

Ivano Toscani, who has been the manager of Anchor Bar for a long time, died in 2018. He has repeatedly questioned that Youngs may have any relationship with Anchor's wing, saying that all credit goes to Teresa Belisi Mo (Teressa Bellissimo). 

Dempsey, CEO of Anchor Bar, said that he is not personally familiar with Young's story, but he pays tribute to the many contributions that different people have made to the history of Wing over the years.

No matter what happened, the earliest written record of each version of Wing is the same year, and it is not 1964, but 1966.

The customer Theodore Clyburn pinned those chicken wings with spicy sauce to the year he graduated from high school in 1964. But Yang did several calculations on the opening time of each of his restaurants, and it was not until 1966 that he applied for a business license for John Young’s Wings and Things-even though small businesses owned by blacks existed in a legal gray area at that time. Common.

"He doesn't always arrange things the right way," Brown-Young said simply. 

1966 was also the first written record of Anchor Bar selling any kind of wings.

A 1969 Buffalo Courier-Express feature about Anchor Bar didn't mention wings at all—though Frank Bellissimo later claimed that they sold 3,000 pounds of wings a week within a month of the first wings.

But in 1966, an ad by Cynthia Van Ness, a librarian at the Buffalo Museum of History, on Courier-Express did list the unlikely specialties of an Italian restaurant: " Grilled chicken wings".

Food historian Miller said that barbecues in the 1960s meant different things to different people, including grilling burgers in the backyard. Barbecue sauce purchased from companies such as Kraft is sweet with molasses. 

In the North at the time, serving barbecues in restaurants was the main African-American tradition. 

"In African-American restaurants, you often find a popular choice," Miller said. "That's usually a thinner sauce." 

"Reclamation": Thomas Jefferson's black descendants brought her ancestors out of the shadows

The shape of the wings of the Anchor Bar may have undergone some evolution. In a 1972 article about the newly discovered wing mania, Dominique Bellissimo told the Buffalo News critic Okun that the wings of the Anchor Bar were "baked in a spice bath" and then coated with barbecue sauce. .

This surprised Ron Duff. By 1969, when he learned them from a pizzeria called Hacienda across the street, when he started serving them at Duff's, wings that had spread all over the city were fried with Frank's and butter. 

But regardless of the timetable of the competition, regardless of the original sauce and cooking methods, Anchor Bar's position in the history of the wing is guaranteed.

Wings that spread like wildfire in Buffalo and around the world—the Canadian Globe and Mail called this food "beer lover’s caviar" in 1982—are the spicy drums and plates invented by Anchor Bar. Blue cheese and celery.

In fact, Bellissimos' idea was to expose them and cut them in half with hot sauce, which is a major innovation in the long history of fried wings, which are predominantly Southern and African American.

John Young had to work harder to gain a place in the history of Buffalo Wings. His daughter said that the price was paid in the years-long campaign.

His whole, breadcrumbs, and playful wings have indeed spread to many takeaways in the predominantly black East Side of Buffalo, many of which have catchy rhyming names, such as Git & Split, Stop & Cop or A Meal for a Steal. Yang's brother Paul has the last one.

But Yang's last restaurant closed in the 1980s, and his brother stopped selling chicken wings in the 1990s. Mombo sauce has disappeared in Queen City for decades-even though Buffalo-style wings continue to dominate the country. Mombo sauce becomes a story told by people.

All this has changed in the last year. 

Now, if you want to try the wing sauce that may be Buffalo's original, all you have to do is ride a bicycle.

Marc Moscato, the founder of travel company Buffalo Bike Tours, learned of John Young's story in 2019 and became obsessed with the idea of ​​reviving mombo sauce. 

He appeared on the shelves of the Buffalo History Museum library, prompting the librarian Van Nis to start writing a huge wing file that traced the history of Buffalo's fried chicken wings, as far back as the hotel menu in 1857. 

Moscato contacted anyone named Young he found on Facebook. He ran out of phone book. In the end, he was lucky: To commemorate last year’s Black History Month, local reporter Madison Carter interviewed Lena Brown-Young about her father’s wings.

"Every few years," Brown-Young told us, "someone called me to attend Black History Month."

As it turns out, as part of a historic wing ride through Buffalo, Brown-Young excels at making special batches of Monbo sauce. 

However, this is not without her mother's worries. She believes that her late husband's hard work in the restaurant for many years and the long-term struggle to gain honor for his wings brought him into the grave early. She didn't want her daughter to suffer the same fate. 

Many years later, when asked to talk about her husband's wings, Christine Young couldn't do it.

"When I mentioned it, she burst into tears," Brown-Young said.

But Brown-Young thinks it is important to pass on to her the story her father told her. "We have never stopped trying to keep this story alive," she said. "I never stopped."

Therefore, in occasional pop-up shops or group bookings of Wing Tours, she will make a batch of lava hot pot mom waves, partly because of her memories of cooking countless batches in her father's restaurant. She made a batch of wings to share.

"There are people waiting in line around the corner for these wings," Brown-Young told a tour group in September. "These are complete wings, all connected. Not just drums and units. These are the original wings."

Before meeting with Brown Young, the tour first visited the apartment where Rick James and Aretha Franklin once lived, and walked through the years of Buffalo civil rights history and the legend of John Young’s various restaurants. . 

The tour ends at the Anchor Bar, where Moscato tells the Bellissimos version of the wing story. But during a tour in August, he was not allowed to complete the story.

"This is not true!" shouted a man who happened to pass by, determined to clarify the facts.

"John Young," he said, "John Young was the first."

Follow Matthew Korfhage on Twitter: @matthewkorfhage