Roth brothers join the hunt

Scott and Steve Roth, giants of the world of Buffalo wings, are joining the Great Chicken Wing Hunt.

The Roth brothers, founders of the cluckbucket (http://cluckbucket.com/) website, are hooking up with our caravan at the tail end of our trip on Friday, August 31 in Buffalo.

Steve is actually cutting short his honeymoon (or maybe he's finishing the honeymoon and merely leaving his bride behind for a weekend) to make the trip. In any event, getting him to Buffalo required a negotiation between Scott and Steve's future wife that involved the question "What is the greatest present in the world I could give to Steve to mark the beginning of the rest of our lives together?" and the answer "permission to travel to Buffalo to appear in a chicken wing film."

The Roth brothers are to be commended for their vast knowledge of Buffalo wings, which is very rare in anyone born outside New York State (they're from St. Louis; Scott lives in Oregon). They're compiling a database of the world's best places to eat wings and Scott is making a short film on wing-eating techniques. Those techniques include The Smash, The Small Bone Twist, The Grenade, The Plunger, The Finger, The Badlands Spinmove, and The Cartoon Chomp.

Scott actually played a role in getting The Great Chicken Wing Hunt off the ground -- and long before he and I had exchanged a single email. Back when I was selling the concept of the wing hunt to my Slovak co-producers, I attempted to demonstrate the special place wings have in American culture by surfing the internet for artifacts of what I called "the Buffalo wing freak subculture". We came across a video of Scott demonstrating the smash wing-eating technique (see his website) while wearing a oversized Buffalo wing hat. The Slovaks were sold.