042724 Way Black History Fact - John Young and Buffalo Wild Wings

paragraphs here along. The short of it is that you know, Buffalo Wild Wings originated with a black restaurant tour, and the popular narrative is that it originated with white restaurant tours. I can't share it all with you because it's too long, so I'm gonna give you just a couple of bullet points. In the nineteen sixties, a black restaurant tour named John

Young open Wings and Things in Buffalo, New York. Around the same time, a white couple named Frank and Teresa Bellissimo began so in Chicken Wings at the Anchor Bar, about a mile away from Wings and Things. By the nineteen eighties, the Bellissimos had become famous for supposedly inventing

Buffalo wings. Yet in recent years, local historians tracing the history of the dish have drawn attention to the contributions of John Young as well as the cooks who came before him, and wings have had a place in both restaurant home cooking for a long time, around the country and around globe. In Buffalo, the oldest known establishment to serve chicken wings is the Clarendon Hotel. A copy of the hotel's menu from July first, eighteen fifty seven, listed

an entree called chicken wings fried. In addition to this menu, Cynthia VanNess, the director of the Library and Archives at the Buffalo History Museum, has also found a recipe for chicken wings in a eighteen ninety four issue of the Buffalo Commercial Advisor. It's unclear when Young opened his Buffalo restaurant, although he applied for a business license for Wings and

Things in nineteen sixty six. Interviews with the Young and former customers indicate that he likely started selling food under that name before applying for the license to do so, and in case, Young's restaurant became known for serving breaded whole wings tossed in Young's own version of mumbo sauce. Again, the article goes a little bit more into the history, the black history of that down in DC and blah

blah blah bah skipping ahead. At some point in the mid nineteen sixties, Frank and Teresa Bellissimo's their Anchor Bar, began serving its own version of chicken wings. Unlike Young's wing the Anchor Anchor Bars, chicken wings were fried, broken into pieces, and tossed in hot sauce in this recipe that today's buffalo wings most closely resemble. As the dish took off in the nineteen seventies and eighties, it was the police and most who received most of the credit

for quote inventing unquote the buffalo wing. Young had moved to Illinois around nineteen seventy. When you returned to Buffalo about a decade later, he was surprised to see how many restaurants were serving what they called buffalo wings. He was also surprised to see that the Anchor Bar had claimed the title of being the first restaurant to serve the wings, especially because he thought that Frank Bellissimo had

gotten the idea from him. Young's advocacy helped him secure recognition as the first person to open a Buffalo restaurant centered around chicken wings. He names it wings and things. That's what he specialized in, and I think he absolutely deserves credit for that, Van Neess says. In nineteen eighties and more restaurants outside Buffalo began to semiple their own buffalo style wings. The franchise Buffalo Wild Wings, originally named Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck, opened in nineteen eighty two

and Columbus, Ohio. As Buffalo Wings spread throughout the country, they became associated with football, and in particular, the Super Bowl. This increased demand for chicken wings has come with a serious change in price. Back when the Super Bowl began in nineteen sixty seven, buffalo wings would have been a cheap chicken option for game day food. Ironically, their growth in popularity since then has turned wings into one of

the most expensive and in demand pieces of chicken. And just so you know, I don't believe I've ever eaten a chicken wing. Ramses doesn't consider.