Foodies

Brews Brothers Grille of Franklin Square heading to Buffalo wings festival

Restaurant competing in two categories

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A Franklin Square restaurant will compete at the National Buffalo Wing Festival in the upstate city of that name on Saturday. Brews Brothers Grille owners Michael Weinberg and Brian Clermont will represent Long Island in the renowned competition, which crowns the country’s best chicken wings.

A little over a year after winning the Festival Favorite Best Wings award at the New York Best Wings Festival Championships in Westbury last June, the pair will take their signature mild buffalo sauce, along with their craft sweet flavor, peanut butter and jelly, to, Buffalo’s Coca Cola Field this weekend.

Roughly 25 restaurants from across the country will send representatives to the city, the birthplace of the buffalo wing, to showcase sauces to more than 80,000 festival-goers.

“It’s a great feeling,” Clermont said of competing at the national festival. “I’ve been cooking since I was a kid, and now, to put out something that I can compete in the national ring, is just amazing.”

Clermont has been cooking in restaurants since he was a teenager. His first job was as a cook at a Friendly’s in Greenlawn. Though he wasn’t able to experiment much with flavors there, when he moved on to the Head of the Bay Club in Huntington, he honed his cooking skills over the 10 years he worked there.

“I made everything you could think of when I was a cook there,” Clermont said. “Part of being a chef is being creative.”

After hearing of their success at the Best Wings Fest in Westbury, the organizers of the national contest contacted Clermont and Weinberg and asked them to compete in Buffalo. According to Clermont, the organizers were particularly interested in their craft specialty flavor, peanut butter and jelly. The idea came to him one night when he had a craving for a PB&J sandwich.

“I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if this were a wing?” Clermont recalled. After some trial and error, he found the perfect balance of grape jelly, peanut butter and sriracha sauce. After the initial success of the flavor, the pair entered the sauce in the Best Wings Fest in Westbury, and took home the festival favorite prize.

The rules of this weekend’s competition are slightly different from what the two friends are used to, however. All of the wings are cooked on the premises by the coordinators of the festival. Each team brings its sauces, and tosses the cooked wings before presenting them to the judges.

While it’s not an ideal way to prepare wings — Clermont does a dry rub and roast each day, so he can prepare his wings fried to order — the men don’t believe it will be a hindrance. “We have to figure something out and adapt,” Clermont said. “We’ll adapt to it and hopefully be successful.”

Brothers in business

Though they are not related, Clermont and Weinberg have been best friends since they were 14 and growing up in Huntington. They always knew they would start a restaurant together, and waited for the right opportunity. It came in 2008, when Weinberg noticed an empty storefront at 183 Franklin Ave., the former restaurant Nook and Cranny. Weinberg, who is the business manager, and Clermont decided to take a chance and bring their eclectic recipes to Franklin Square in 2009.

“We’ve been very lucky,” Weinberg said of their customers. “They’re all really good, down-to-earth people here. They’re loyal — they come back over and over again.”

“We’ve been very fortunate with our regular customers and the people of Franklin Square,” Clermont added. “I think people in this town know good food.”

Though he grew up in Huntington, Weinberg now calls Franklin Square home. He moved to the neighborhood in 2006, and it was clear to him that it was the right setting not only for his family, but also for their business.

“My kids’ friends and their parents come here to eat all the time,” he said. “It’s a really good, family-oriented town.”

When news of their invitation to the national festival spread among their customers, the pair said, it was greeted with enthusiasm and a sense of pride for the town. “They were pumped and excited,” Weinberg said. “Everybody wants to go.”

Although they can call themselves Long Island champions, Clermont and Weinberg are eager to see how they stack up on the national level. “It would be the biggest thing we could do in chicken wings,” Weinberg said. “After this, there’s nothing else — except for next year, I guess.”