The Complicated And Fascinating Story Behind The Origin Of Buffalo Wings

Sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s, a restaurant in Buffalo called Anchor Bar started serving what we now know today as Buffalo wings. As the story seemingly goes, Anchor Bar's then-chef and co-owner, Teressa Bellissimo, threw together some wings as a late-night snack for her son's friends from college. Or it was for Catholic regulars anxiously awaiting the ability to eat meat at midnight on a Friday. Or it was a case of wings that were delivered to the restaurant by mistake instead of the chicken backs and necks, which Anchor Bar used to make spaghetti sauce. Regardless of which version of the story is accurate (that is, if any of them are accurate), Bellissimo definitely created Buffalo wings, right?

Maybe not. Right around the same time the restaurant was purportedly venturing into specialized chicken wings, another Buffalo-based restaurant was also making a killing on the product: John Young's Wings and Things. The venue's Black eponymous owner was eventually forced to leave Buffalo following a particularly bad bout of racial violence in 1969, and only found out later that the Bellissimo family claimed to have invented the Buffalo wing. 

So both Anchor Bar and Young claimed to have created Buffalo wings, but who's correct? Unfortunately, it's not all that easy to say. Because the facts are all over the place, the truth isn't all that clear.

As the outlet History notes, the facts here are extremely muddled. Anchor Bar's supporters like to point out that John Young's business license for Wings and Things dates to 1966, two years after the Bellissimos claim to have created the dish. Even so, Young's supporters have rightly pointed out he was likely selling his recipe years before applying for the license. Young also claimed Teressa's husband Frank Bellissimo was a regular customer at Wings and Things, which is certainly possible — but we only have Young's word to go on.

Moreover, we don't even know if Anchor Bar's claims about when they first created their version of Buffalo wings are accurate. Though the restaurant alleges to have created the wings in 1964, the dish wasn't highlighted in a profile of the restaurant in 1969. (It should also be noted that another local chain called Duff's, which purportedly got the idea from Anchor Bar, seemingly sold them later that year.) Theoretically, they could've been introduced at any point during that five-year gap.

Adding to the confusion is that the dish might not even really come from Buffalo. By Young's own admission, there was already a restaurant in Washington, D.C. similarly called Wings N' Things, which served (you guessed it) chicken wings around the time Young opened his business. Young's own Buffalo sauce was a variant of a D.C. condiment called Mumbo Sauce, which was already a Wings N' Things staple. (Though, to wit, Young certainly put his own spin on it.)

Then again, the idea that the most important part of the story whether John Young or Teressa Bellissimo is unanimously credited for the creation of Buffalo wings is in and of itself a false dichotomy. Both sold varieties of chicken wings that bear little resemblance to each other. The chief similarity here is that both basically, respectfully sold a previously-undesirable product by deep frying it in oil.

Beyond that shared trait, both versions of chicken wings are very different. Young's take on it wasn't portioned (meaning you got an entire wing, similar to how you'd get a fried wing at Popeye's), and his version of Mumbo Sauce is more like a spicier version of barbecue sauce than anything else. Anchor Bar, meanwhile, created the cayenne pepper-based sauce that we now know just as "Buffalo sauce," and came up with the idea of serving it alongside blue cheese.

While it's entirely possible Anchor Bar's owners got the idea for serving a chicken wing menu item from eating at Wings and Things, this isn't an unusual practice within the restaurant industry; in fact, it isn't even typically considered a form of restaurant competition. Generally speaking, Teressa Bellisimo is usually attributed to the creation of Buffalo wings by popular consensus, but as the whole complicated, overarching story suggests, that claim might not be entirely cut and dried.