Try John Young’s Mumbo Wings for a Good Cause

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Buffalo Bike Tours, Michigan Street Corridor, and Young Family have teamed up to raise money for a John Young mural in Buffalo. This Wednesday, April 28, 2021, there will be a Mumbo Wing and Steak Sandwich Pop Up from 11 am to 3 pm. It will be located at The Broadway Market, 999 Broadway in Buffalo. Lina Brown Young, John Young’s daughter, will be cooking up the wings using her dad's secret Mumbo wing sauce recipe. The steak sandwiches will be made by Stone, who used to work at Young’s Wings N’ Things. Orders are to-go only and by pre-sale only, which you can place here. The proceeds from the pop-up sale will help fund a new mural honoring John Young and his contribution to Buffalo history. The location of the mural will be on the outside of the Carl Jeff Barber Shop, 864 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. The project is sponsored by Buffalo Bike Tours and Michigan Street Corridor.

“You don’t know Buffalo until you’ve tried mambo wings. Chicken wings are inextricably linked to soul food and black culture – and John Young deserves a greater place in our understanding of Buffalo's most famous dish.” ~ Buffalo Bike Tours owner, Marc Moscato, via a press release emailed to me

In addition to the pop-up event, the group is raising money with the sale of a new T-shirt available featuring an illustration of John Young by New York Times illustrator Koren Shadmi. The t-shirts cost $26. You can also make a donation towards the mural fund via the GoFundMe page.

During the mid-1960s, "Wing King" John Young owned a restaurant here in Buffalo called John Young’s Wings ’n Things. There is an on-going debate over who actually created the Buffalo wing, but John told a reporter with the New Yorker Magazine, who was doing a story about the origin of the Buffalo wing:

“I am actually the creator of the wing. If the Anchor Bar was selling chicken wings, nobody in Buffalo knew it then. After I left here, everybody started chicken wings.”