Each will have its fans.
“Here’s another mumbo sauce monster now,” Eun Joo “Angela” Lee, 53, says, smiling at a man who has just walked into Smokey’s, a carryout in the Petworth neighborhood.
“The mumbo sauce here is the best in the city,” Kobie Green, 38, says, pouring it onto potato wedges. “If you had a contest, I guarantee Ms. Lee would win.”
Green is one of several regulars who for years have tried to persuade Lee to put the sauce on the market. As it is, she makes about 15 gallons a week, which she pours into empty syrup bottles that sit within arm’s reach of customers. She has also sold it by the gallon to people holding family gatherings, sending holiday gifts or shipping off college students.
“No mumbo sauce, no business,” Lee says, estimating that 99 percent of the orders she takes call for it.
Lee, who has owned Smokey’s for about two decades, says she never planned on this life. She was a high school music teacher in South Korea before coming to the United States with her husband in the early 1980s. After she arrived, her older sister sold her the restaurant, which back then wasn’t next to a dry cleaner boasting “100% organic cleaning.”
“I cried almost every day,” Lee recalls. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”
But over the years, she says, she has gotten to know her customers. Unlike many other carryouts in the city, there is no bulletproof glass in front of the register, and stools invite customers to sit. “Now,” Lee says, “we’re like a family.”
Everyone knows its name
“Ma, can I have a toothpick?” asks Darius Curtis, 24, whose relatives have brought him to Smokey’s since he was a child. He arrived on a recent day with only half of his hair pulled neatly into braids because he sneaked out of a nearby barbershop mid-appointment to get a single chicken wing, which he then smothered in sauce.
“I love it,” he says.
Down on 14th Street NW, the scene is less familial at Yum’s, but the demand remains. Irene Chin stands behind a thick glass near the register, flipping through the day’s orders. On almost every ticket are the letters MS.
“Mumbo sauce, mumbo sauce, mumbo sauce,” Chin says. “On everything, mumbo sauce.”
That two words could capture a sense of place is what led the band Mambo Sauce to choose it as its name.
Lead vocalist Alfred “Black Boo” Duncan says the band was without a name for about two years when its seven members locked themselves in a room, determined to find one.
They wanted something that said “D.C.” without literally saying it.
“Someone threw out ‘Chicken Wings and Mambo Sauce,’ and we laughed at first,” Duncan says. “And then we thought about Mambo sauce, and that’s one thing you can only get in D.C.”
They also liked that, similar to their music, there is no single recipe. The band is known for go-go music but also incorporates sounds from hip-hop, soul and other genres.
“That’s the same thing with mambo sauce,” Duncan says. “No one really knows what’s in it. They just know it’s good.” (The title of the band’s most recent album? “The Recipe.”)
Kitchen connoisseur
After finishing off four chicken wings in her husband’s Ford Expedition, Arsha Jones says, she realized she was raising three — soon to be four — suburban boys who would probably never know a taste she associated with so many memories and missed when she left for college. So the Web designer did what a 1950s-era mother might: She experimented until she came up with a recipe.
“Initially, it was just something for the family to do,” Jones says, standing in her Annapolis kitchen. Pictures of her four boys, who range from 4 weeks old to 9 years old, cover the fridge along with Spider-Man stickers and alphabet magnets. “Then it got to the point where they were requesting it every week, and I thought, ‘If they really like it, I wonder if we could sell it?’ ”
In May, she and her husband, Charles Jones, 38, launched Capital City Mumbo Sauce, which they run from their home. Already they’ve received requests for cases and have garnered repeat customers. They’ve also seen the sauce used on dishes other than fried carryout staples, including pork loin and shrimp. Neither plans to quit their day jobs anytime soon, but they see great possibilities. Maybe mumbo sauce in grocery aisles in Bethesda.
“We’re hoping to move it along to a point where it’s not only accepted by a subculture,” she says, “but where everyone wants to try it.”
Loading...
Comments