Are Buffalo Wings Rooted in Soul Food?
As it turns out, they may be a derivative of mambo wings
This is an excerpt from “American Food: A Not-So-Serious History,” by Rachel Wharton and illustrated by Kimberly Ellen Hall, released this month and on sale now.
“Tourists Eat Wings. Buffalonians Eat Subs.” So proclaimed a recent headline in a national food magazine.
Which can’t possibly be true, unless literally everyone I saw on a recent trip to the western New York city was a tourist, including tables of high school students, old Irish American ladies at an old Irish American pub, people getting takeout at 2 a.m., and young professionals in their Bills jerseys mingling at a gastropub after a game.
Buffalonians may be the creators of much more than wings — they have their own pizza (somewhere between Chicago and Detroit style), plus stuffed banana peppers and beef on weck, to name but a few. But like Americans around the country at restaurants high and low, they love wings. They eat Buffalo-style hot wings, yes, but also wings grilled, smoked, suicidally hot, slathered with Cajun spice, and covered with various sauces. They eat them at the multiple locations of Duff’s and line up at Gabriel’s Gate and Gene McCarthy’s Old First Ward Brewing Company and at La Nova pizzeria, which even has a national frozen wing distribution division, and countless other places that constantly make best-of lists and wing trail maps.
But they don’t eat them battered and deep-fried and covered with mambo sauce at John Young’s Wings and Things, gone since the 1980s.
This is important because John Young, who died in 1998, had said it was he who started off the whole wing thing in Buffalo, not Teressa Bellissimo of the Anchor Bar, which now has a location in New York City’s Times Square.
And I think the story of John Young — who grew up with 13 siblings on a four-acre Alabama truck farm, worked with his father on a riverboat kitchen, and moved to Buffalo for work in the 1950s with plenty of other blacks during the Great Migration — definitely has some credence.
No matter what happened, the Anchor Bar’s Teressa Bellissimo is the creator of what non-Buffalonians call the Buffalo wing: It’s cut into pieces, paired with celery and blue cheese, and, most important, has the Buffalo wing flavor, which today is a base of Frank’s RedHot sauce and butter. As several have already pointed out, that is no small thing. (Including Arthur Bovino, who covers both the nationwide embrace of buffalo flavor and John Young in his 2018 book “Buffalo Everything.”)
John Young’s wings were similar but different: Like the others, they were fried and paired with a Day-Glo reddish sauce he called “mombo” (a sauce you’ll also see spelled mumbo, mambo, or mumble, depending on where you are), but they were served whole and fried Southern-style with a crispy “Golden Dip” batter.
In 1996, Young told Buffalo News food critic Janice Okun that he served fried wings without sauce at several Buffalo restaurants he’d run since 1961 — along with other soul foods like ribs and grits. After he heard about a fried wing place in Washington, D.C., from a traveling boxer, he added the sauce and named a new operation at Jefferson and Utica Streets John Young’s Wings and Things.
“The day we opened, people fell out of the sky,” Young told Okun. “I was selling 10 wings — whole — for $1 then, and people were lined up around the corner like they were going to a rummage sale.”
Young didn’t give details, but we can be pretty sure mombo sauce was not totally his invention, though his recipe likely was. Since at least 1962 and maybe the late 1950s, there was a fried wing and “mambo” sauce place in Washington, D.C., which was also called Wings N Things, and so popular it inspired the 1965 album from Johnny Hodges and Wild Bill Davis called “Wings & Things.”
By most accounts, the D.C. Wings N Things was inspired by Argia B’s Mumbo Sauce, a barbecue sauce created by Argia B. Collins at his Chicago restaurants in the 1950s. He moved up to Chicago from Mississippi, where a mild tomato-based barbecue sauce is common. Collins’ customers at his many restaurants put it on everything he served, including fried chicken.
In fact, an Argia B’s-like sauce just called “mild sauce” has been served in South Chicago fried chicken joints since at least the 1960s. It’s more like barbecue sauce with a bit of sweetness, while D.C. mambo/ mumbo/mumble sauce has a little more sweet-and-sour going for it.
That’s not surprising, considering who now makes it: primarily Chinese “carryouts,” which took over the fried chicken business after the Washington, D.C., riots of 1968, which actually claimed the original Wings N Things.
John Young’s sauce seems like it may have been somewhere in between all of these. (By the way, in both D.C. and Chicago, the fried wings served with it are often battered.)
I have also found a 1963 ad for pit barbecue with mumbo sauce in what was titled the “negro section” of the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, which leads to me to think this sauce either existed in the South or made its way around the country thanks to Argia B.
As soul food historian and author Adrian Miller and others have established, soul food is an American cuisine, rooted in some of the cooking practices of African Americans in the Deep South. These then moved across the country during the Great Migration with black Southerners like John Young. Meaning, when John Young opened a fried wing and mumbo place, it was a little like an Egyptian guy in Philly opening a halal chicken and rice cart after seeing one in New York. It was already connected to who he was as a cook; he just got clued into a more successful way to market it.
As Miller says of John Young in his 2013 book “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time,” hot fish, or fried fish covered in hot sauce, was common in black-owned Southern establishments, so “a chicken wing drowning in hot sauce,” he wrote, “fits squarely within the soul food tradition.”
Oh, but wait, you say. John Young didn’t fully wing it till 1966, which is two full years after the Bellissimos have always said they created their own. But, as several others have pointed out, there’s no definitive proof of the Anchor Bar serving wings in 1964.
This point was first made by Calvin Trillin in his 1980 New Yorker article on the history of Buffalo chicken wings, generally considered to have both made Buffalo’s wings a national thing and to have first given John Young’s creation story a public mention. (According to research by Buffalo writer Steve Chichon, there’s no written record of the Bellissimo’s wings until 1969, when a phone book listing includes “chicken wings.” John Young’s Wings and Things is in there, too.)
We do already know at least one Bellissimo stretched the truth, considering that Teressa’s husband, Frank, and her son, Dominic, told different stories to reporters over the years, which also tended to highlight their own roles rather than Teressa’s. Now all three of them have passed away, as has the general manager who eventually became the company co-owner with Dominic’s widow. (On the other hand, I found the court filing for “Youngs Wings&Things” in the 1966 Erie County public records.)
By 1972, when the first big article came out about the Anchor Bar’s wings in the Buffalo News, John Young had closed his restaurant and moved to Decatur, Illinois, to run a food truck serving soul food to factory workers. His daughter Lina told a news reporter a few years later that the 1967 race riots in Buffalo had made him worry for the safety of his family.
I can’t help but notice that in three 1970s stories in regional papers, Frank Bellissimo specifically refers to Teressa’s sauce as a barbecue sauce — like the original mumbo sauce — meaning that’s what they thought they were making. (Given that both American barbecue sauce and hot sauce are African American creations — Adrian Miller’s book is among those that offer plenty of proof — no matter what, the Bellissimos were inspired by black cooks.)
Oddly, the first story, from 1972, says that while other places fried the wings, at the Anchor Bar they were baked in a really high oven. You might wonder, as I did, what does this mean? Did they lie to protect their “secret” recipe? Make the wings differently back then? Some combination of the two?
Plus, John Young’s Wings and Things was located at 1313 Jefferson Avenue, just a little over a mile away from the Anchor Bar. Plus, John Young’s Wings and Things was said to be a hot spot for traveling musicians, and the Anchor Bar was a jazz club, meaning any number of people could have spread the gospel of wings from John Young or D.C. to the Bellissimos. (John Young’s daughter told a researcher named Amy Kedron in 2014 that Frank Bellissimo occasionally came to their very nearby restaurant and their father went to his, but I don’t know why John Young wouldn’t have thought to mention that when he was still alive.)
But I believe that none of this really matters in the long run, and not just because the Anchor Bar created the flavor called Buffalo. What really matters is that Young — and by association his siblings and children and grandchildren — could certainly be as much a part of the hot wing success story as the Bellissimos, even if he wasn’t a part of their creation.
John Young’s mumbo wings could be part of the modern Buffalo wing story the same way almost every decent wing in the state is: the way the grilled wings at La Nova pizza are, the way the Cajun spice dry-rubbed wings at Gene McCarthy’s Old First Ward Brewing Company are, the way even the mass-produced wings at Buffalo Wild Wings are.
This is what Buffalo native and economic development expert Amy Kedron was getting at in her Southwestern Law Review article about wings, which was called “Stock Symbols, Street Signs and Other Color Lines: Capital and Subjectivity in the New Dual Economy.”
Kedron wrote that because John Young was black, he wasn’t able to partake in any Buffalo wing boom. Instead, his business — right where the Buffalo race riots took place in 1967 and closed shortly thereafter — never found the footing or the funding it deserved. If John Young’s story had been told even a 10th as often as the Bellissimos’ was, Kedron wrote, his family also might be running an empire of restaurants and bottled sauces today.
Maybe it’s not too late. By all accounts, John Young’s daughter still knows how to make the mumbo. Maybe some aspiring entrepreneur will read this or Arthur Bovino’s book and help her get it back in circulation. Maybe John Young will rise from a culinary footnote back into the Buffalo chicken wing king he once was.
Rachel Wharton is a James Beard Award-winning journalist and author of “American Food (A Not-So-Serious History),” available from Abrams Books in fall 2019.
