Who Really Invented Buffalo Wings? The Anchor Bar vs John Young

The Anchor Bar story, in three versions

Frank Bellissimo, who ran the Anchor Bar on Main Street with his wife Teressa, told Calvin Trillin in 1980 that it began with a mistake: a delivery of wings instead of the backs and necks the kitchen used for spaghetti sauce. Their son Dom told it differently. In his version it was late on a Friday night in 1964, Catholics could eat meat again at midnight, and he asked his mother to make something free for some big-spending regulars.

A third version, recorded by the geographer John Harmon and told on the Anchor Bar's own website today, has Teressa feeding a group of Dom's hungry friends who came in late. The bar dates it to March 4, 1964.

The versions agree on the dish. Teressa cut each wing into two pieces, deep-fried them without breading, sauced them with hot sauce and served them with celery from the bar's antipasto and the blue cheese dressing it used on salads. That is still the template for our Anchor Bar style Buffalo wings.

John Young's claim

On the same trip, Trillin met John Young, who told him, "I am actually the creator of the wing." Young pointed out that Black families had always eaten chicken wings. What he claimed to have invented was the sauce, and with it the idea of wings as a specialty; his were whole and breaded, covered in a tomato-based sauce. Trillin spelled it mambo sauce; Young's family and Buffalo's public radio station spell it mumbo.

Young told Trillin that wings in sauce became his specialty in the mid-1960s, at John Young's Wings 'n Things, before he moved to Illinois in 1970. His daughter, Lina Young, says he started in the early 1960s after a boxer told him wings were selling well in Washington, D.C.

HISTORY reports he applied for a business license in 1966 and was probably selling under that name earlier. He died in 1998. His sauce is a cousin of the sweet red sauce D.C. carryouts still pour over fried wings, which you can make with our DC mambo sauce wings.

What the paper trail shows

Not much, which is Trillin's point. In the Buffalo newspaper files he found one long 1969 profile of Frank and Teressa, five years after the supposed invention, and it never mentions wings. A local poultry distributor told him that Young and Frank Bellissimo both began buying lots of wings in the mid-1960s, but nobody had kept receipts.

The first newspaper feature on the Bellissimos' wings that HISTORY found ran in 1972. Fried chicken wings themselves were not new in the city: HISTORY found them on a Buffalo hotel menu from 1857. So the answer depends on what counts. Teressa's split, unbreaded, hot-sauced wing with blue cheese is the dish the world calls Buffalo wings; Young may well have made wings a Buffalo specialty first.

Chicken Wing Day, and how wings went national

In 1977 the City of Buffalo proclaimed July 29 Chicken Wing Day, crediting Frank Bellissimo's 1964 experiment. Trillin dryly noted that the proclamation should have named Teressa. July 29 is now promoted every year as National Chicken Wing Day.

Smithsonian traces the spread from there: Duff's and other Buffalo bars in the 1970s, Trillin's article itself, Hooters in 1983 and Domino's national rollout of wings in 1994. Today there are dozens of styles, from Atlanta lemon pepper to Korean double-fried, in our wings hub.

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