a person · NYJohn Young

Sold chicken wings whole and uncut — breaded, deep-fried, and coated in a tomato-based sauce he called mumbo, or mambo — from a restaurant on Buffalo's East Side in the 1960s. He said he was selling them years before the Anchor Bar put them on a menu, and he said so for the rest of his life. Born in Stockton, Alabama in 1934, he came to Buffalo in 1948 at thirteen, and he died in 1998.

Young grew up on a farm in Alabama, one of fourteen children, and came north to Buffalo as a boy in 1948.

He took the idea for a wing restaurant from a boxer. "He told me that there was a restaurant in Washington, D.C. that was doing a good business with wings and I decided to specialize," Young said in a later interview. Nothing in this project's sources names that D.C. restaurant. What he built out of the tip was John Young's Wings 'n Things, on Jefferson Avenue on the East Side — the Criterion puts the address at 1313 Jefferson at the corner of East Utica. Cookie Gilchrist of the Bills ate there. So did the disc jockey George "Hound Dog" Lorenz.

The wings went out whole — no cut at the joints, no drumette and flat — under breading and a sauce he made himself. He spelled it mambo some days and mumbo others.

The start date moves depending on who is counting. Wikipedia has him serving from 1961. Buffalo Bike Tours puts him at Carlton and Jefferson in 1961 and has him filing as John Young's Wing N' Things at East Utica in 1966. History.com found the business licence application in 1966 and reports that interviews with Young and with former customers indicate he was selling under that name before he applied. The National Buffalo Wing Festival's own Hall of Flame page dates the opening to 1964. Young's own figure, given to the Courier-Express in 1981, was volume rather than a year: "I was selling 5,000 pounds of chicken wings in 1962."

He registered the restaurant's name at the county courthouse and left the Buffalo area in 1970 for Decatur, Illinois, where he ran two restaurants and two mobile trucks. He came back to Buffalo about 1980 and opened three more — East Delevan, Central Park Plaza, Bailey Avenue — and in the mid-1980s ran two businesses in Tulsa. Coming back is when he found out what had happened to the wing while he was away. He believed Frank Bellissimo had got the idea from him, and he said the Anchor Bar did not carry wings as a regular menu item until 1974. Buffalo's Common Council gave him a proclamation in 1982 for creating the mambo sauce.

Recognition past the city came later and came after him. In 2013 the National Buffalo Wing Festival inducted him into its Hall of Flame, posthumously, at Drew Cerza's hand. Donn Esmonde, the Buffalo News columnist whose own column had started the festival, wrote that year: "Had fate taken a different turn, we might today be slathering our wings in mambo sauce and Young would posthumously wear the crown of creation." A mural called King of Wings went up at Jefferson and Carlton.

Inference — the disagreement is not really about a date. Young's wing is a different object: whole, breaded, red with a sweet sauce out of a Black carryout tradition that runs through Chicago and Washington. The Anchor Bar's is cut, bare-fried and orange with cayenne butter. A reader who wants to know who was first has to decide first what counts as the same dish, and nobody in this record's sources agrees on that either.

Whole wing, not jointed. Breaded, then deep-fried, then coated in the mumbo sauce — tomato-based, sweet, closer to a barbecue sauce than to cayenne and butter. The sauce goes on after the fry, the same order as Buffalo's, and the resemblance stops there.

His daughter Lina Brown-Young bottles his original sauce and, since 2020, cooks his recipe on Buffalo Bike Tours' Wing Ride, which runs May to October. The bottled sauce sells as John Young's Original.