What Is Mumbo Sauce? D.C.'s Carryout Sauce, Born in Chicago

What it tastes like

Think ketchup-red, glossy and sweet first, with vinegar tang and, in some shops, real heat. WETA's Boundary Stones history quotes a description of it as somewhere between barbecue and sweet-and-sour sauce, and notes that the D.C. version runs thinner than Chicago's.

There is no single recipe. Washingtonian reports that it changed from one District kitchen to the next as it spread in the 1980s and '90s. Our D.C. carryout wings with mambo sauce use a Food Network Kitchen sauce of ketchup, sugar, hot sauce, pineapple juice, vinegar, smoked paprika and a little soy.

The Chicago original

Argia B. Collins Sr. carried a family recipe north from Mississippi as a teenager, WETA writes, and settled in Chicago in the 1940s, where he and his brothers opened barbecue restaurants on the South Side. Customers wanted the sauce to take home, so he bottled it, and it reached grocery wholesalers in 1968.

The trademark is his. The federal registration for MUMBO, for barbecue sauce, is held by Select Brands of Chicago and lists first use in March 1950. That registration dates to 1999; WETA and the company's lawyers say Collins first registered the name in 1958.

How D.C. made it its own

By the 1960s mumbo sauce was popular in Washington, first at Black-owned carryouts and later at Asian-owned fried chicken carryouts (WETA). Who poured it first is disputed: some credit Wings 'N Things at 7th Street and Florida Avenue NW, others Johnny Boy in Capitol Heights, Maryland.

It even touches the Buffalo wing fight. History.com notes that John Young, who sold whole breaded wings in his own mumbo sauce in Buffalo in the 1960s, disputed the claim of the Anchor Bar, home of our Anchor Bar style wings. In a 1981 interview he said a friend back from Washington told him people there were going crazy over chicken wings.

Mumbo or mambo: the trademark fight

In 2011 Arsha and Charles Jones launched Capital City Mumbo Sauce in the D.C. area and asked the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to cancel the Chicago registration, arguing that mumbo had become a generic word in Washington. After nearly two years, the Board dismissed the petition in 2013, finding the generic claim unproven.

The Joneses settled, gave up mumbo and renamed the brand Capital City Mambo Sauce, which Washingtonian valued at $2 million by 2019. That is why bottles, menus and fans use both spellings. The sauce is so local that when Mayor Muriel Bowser posted in 2018 that it annoyed her, the post drew more than 2,300 comments, most defending it.

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