A friend of mine is in the process of putting together a rocking little documentary film that should appeal to the more adventurous of our chilihead readers.

I released the following article by my friend, Matt, in my latest newsletter and with his permission, I share it here…

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THE GREAT CHICKEN WING HUNT!
by: Matt Reynolds
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It all started in a pub in Bratislava, Slovakia. I was eating wings and drinking Pilsner beers. With me were a Slovak actor, an arabist and documentary filmmaker.

“I’m sick of being a text journalist,” I said, shaking a wing for emphasis. It had been a bad day at work. “I want to make films.”

“About what?” someone said.

“I’ll go back to where I was born and find the world’s greatest Buffalo wing,” I said. I had always wanted to organize a wing-tasting trip. I would model it after those bus loads of tourists who take wine-tasting trips in the Finger Lakes Region in New York State.

“What’s a Buffalo wing?”

“I became a wing fanatic at age four,” I said, lost in my thoughts. “Doctors told me to give wings up because I was developing an ulcer. I couldn’t do it. I tried becoming a vegetarian when I was 18. But I broke down and ate wings. It’s hard living here, where good wings are a rarity. Luckily, more and more restaurants are learning to them correctly.”

“What’s a Buffalo wing?”

“A fried chicken wing coated with a cayenne-pepper based sauce,” I said. “The Buffalo wing was probably the inspiration behind these wings, only the sauce is wrong and they should be served with celery and blue cheese.”

“I’ll make that film with you,” the documentary filmmaker said. She had had a few. “We’ll go to the U.S. and pig out on wings. We’ll drink and eat and travel and it will kick ass.”

It sounded fine. But everything sounded fine at that point.

The next day I met the filmmaker and showed her some Buffalo-wing related images on the internet and she was still interested. I showed her a film of a man in a Styrofoam wing hat demonstrating a technique for separating meat from wing bone by slamming his Buffalo wing at a certain angle against a table.

“Genialne,” she said (that means “brilliant” in Slovak), of the man smashing the wing. She wanted to know everything I knew about wings. She wanted to hear about 10-cent Buffalo wing nights and Peppermasters and Spice Boys and grown men who wear wing hats.

She wanted to hear about the time I ate 57 chicken wings in one sitting.

That’s how The Great Chicken Wing Hunt was born.

MARCH OF THE WINGS

Among other things, the film is about searching for perfection. People ask, why look for perfection in the form of Buffalo wings? Why wings? Why now?

“Because in the 43 years since the Buffalo wing was invented, it has become one of the world’s most popular foods,” I say, trying not to sound pompous. “Wings are on the verge of stardom all over the globe. You can buy Buffalo wings from Prague to Bangkok. They are not always the best wings, but there they are, on the menu, and more and more restaurants are serving them. It’s like pizza 50 years ago.”

I made this speech recently in my flat in Warsaw, Poland, where I live, to a group of Polish partygoers.

Cooking hot wings for Slavs is a hobby.

“When I was a child, wings were only available in Buffalo and in central New York,” I tell them. “I couldn’t get them when I visited relatives outside the state. Today, there are wing websites run by people from Texas to Oregon. There are hundreds of wing sauces. Wing eating competitions. A wing festival. And I, living in ex-communist Poland, can go to the supermarket down the street and buy a bottle of cayenne-pepper sauce…”

The project is growing bigger every day. We have a website, www.chickenwinghunt.com, an American film producer, Larry Anne Evans, and a hunt within a hunt planned for Manhattan.

Besides being the basis of our movie, the hunt is shaping up to be great time in its own right: good food, good people, beautiful countryside, adventure. See information below if you want to join us. The more the merrier. Here’s the basic plan:

Me, a film crew, and as many wing buffs as we can scare up will travel across New York State, sample wings from around 100 restaurants, and crown one of those wings the best in the world. Our trip starts in Manhattan on Saturday August 18 and ends two weeks later in Buffalo at the National
Buffalo Wing Festival. We will stop in all major cities in New York State and dip into Northern Pennsylvania and Canada. In each city we stop in, we are organizing a separate hunt for that city’s
best wing. Anyone is welcome to join, either for the entire hunt or for a part of it. (Only those who take part in the entire trip, however, will be able to cast a vote for the world’s best wing.)

More information is available at our website, www.chickenwinghunt.com. Email questions or comments to the organizers, or sign up for our newsletter or join our MySpace group.

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It takes a lot of work to put such a trip together. Especially when the organizers are overseas! I’ve been helping out Matt and his friends with some connections and introductions on this project. When I first heard about it, I thought, what a great trip for a Pepper Odyssey, and figured this was right up our alley. Matt and the crew are looking for a female protagonist for this ultimate chilihead’s reality film and I ain’t it!

So, If you or someone you know is looking for something interesting to do this August, let me or Matt know specifically and if you’re quirky enough to fit the bill, you could find yourself starring in a major motion picture.

THE LOGISTICS… for the layman, that means, “travel arrangements and accommodations”.

The logistics for the project are being run behalf of the project by Ariane Griffiths of Foundation Concierge. Founded in 2006 by Ariane and Tim Griffiths, Foundation Concierge is a full service lifestyle management company. Providing services from errand running, appointment booking and reminder services to elaborate event planning, researching your corporate or family vacations and even sending out client appreciation and greeting cards, Foundation Concierge makes your personal life easy and fun! With small business services such as graphic design, marketing and administration, Foundation Concierge can also help you take control of your company chaos.

With Ariane’s hard work, the zany film crew and a bus load of chiliheads, you can expect to experience the best two weeks of 2007!

Do let us know if you’ll be going! We might just find a way to hijack the bus.

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