a joint · MDCapital City Mambo Sauce

A bottler, not a counter. Arsha and Charles Jones started Capital City in a home kitchen in 2011 to put D.C. mambo sauce in a jar, and the company now runs a headquarters and distribution building at Melford Town Center in Bowie, Maryland. The bottles reach Giant, Safeway, Wegmans and Target.

Capital City, LLC was established in 2011. The company says it was created "to give a taste of home to Washington, D.C. metropolitan natives" — Arsha Jones, a Washington native, made the sauce in her kitchen, and the family turned it into a business. Its own about page calls it "a minority, family-owned company" based in Arnold, Maryland.

Its history page puts the sauce's origin at Wings-n-Things, "an African American-owned restaurant," whose first shop it places at 7th and Florida Avenue NW in the late 1960s, where mambo sauce was made as a condiment for fried chicken wings. That account is one side of a long argument. The Mumbo trademark belongs to a Chicago line: Argia B. Collins Sr. used it from at least 1950, his successor Select Brands registered it in 1999, and the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board found a D.C. company could not take the name from its Chicago founder.

Charles Jones died in October 2019, aged 45 or 46 by different counts; Arsha Jones has run the company since. In 2017 the founders took Black Enterprise's Family Business award.

On 18 May 2021 the company signed for 8,280 square feet at 5021 Howerton Way in Melford Town Center, Bowie, moving its corporate headquarters and distribution out of a smaller Anne Arundel County warehouse. That address is why this bottler has a place record at all: it is a building a reader could drive to, not a shop they can eat in.

Bottled mambo sauce sells through national grocery. The company's own about page still names Arnold, Maryland as its base, while the 2021 lease named Bowie; this record maps the Bowie building and flags the disagreement.