I get it - but we’re losing a grasp on it,” says local chef Adam Terhune. For some, the dish has lost touch with its roots. At the restaurant Party Fowl, I dine on hot chicken with bourbon-glazed beignets, while at Dino’s I have a hot chicken sandwich with a $6 beer-and-shot special. These days, you’ll find hot chicken all over the city, enhancing everything from pizzas to salads - there’s even the Music City Hot Chicken Festival every July. ‘Damn Hot!!’ and ‘Shut the Cluck Up!!!’ are more novelty than pleasure. ‘Hot!’ is the most flavourful, however, thanks to the light habanero. I order a nugget platter that covers the spectrum, and have to agree - ‘Medium’ is the level at which the spice really makes itself known. “Any respectable baseline should start at ‘Medium’,” says Brian Morris, the restaurant’s chef and culinary director.
#NASHVILLE HOT CHICKEN NEAR ME FULL#
His job is to stir the vats continuously and glaze each order to the requisite spice level, from ‘Southern’ (no heat) to ‘Shut the Cluck Up!!!’, a demonic concoction full of ghost chillies. In the kitchen, line cook Leiby is manning the ‘dip station’ - cauldrons loaded with fryer oil and spice rubs. In the past decade, Prince’s has inspired a new wave of joints across the city and beyond, such as Hattie B’s Hot Chicken, on Lower Broadway, which has an average wait time of 90 minutes all day long.
In the following decades, Prince relocated his shack several times around the city, eventually changing its name to Prince’s Hot Chicken in 1980, when André Prince Jeffries, his great-niece, took over. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īfter a few years, the BBQ Chicken Shack moved close to the Ryman Auditorium, where it gained a cult following among the city’s country music stars during the post-war heyday of the Grand Ole Opry.
Hot chicken first emerged in the 1930s, when a man named James Thornton Prince began serving it at his BBQ Chicken Shack, just down the street from Tennessee A&I, a historically Black university (now called Tennessee State). How did a dish so challengingly hot become so iconic? Like so many emblematic Southern foods, fried chicken can trace its origins back to African slaves, who fried and braised poultry in spices. The taste is surprisingly botanical, as the spices dance from inside my mouth to my lips, and although I’m sweating, I can’t stop eating. There’s sweetness before the habanero heat hits. It’s incredibly spicy, but there’s a tune to this symphony of chillies. As I take a bite, the habanero hits my nostrils. My chicken arrives blackened from the spice rub, and is too hot to touch, but I throw caution to the wind. Opened in 1997, Bolton’s is a city institution. It’s served on white bread with a pickle that stands no chance of offsetting the cayenne, habanero and ghost peppers. The meat is buttermilk-marinated, rubbed in a special spice blend and deep-fried until crisp. The spicy, cayenne-soaked style of Southern fried poultry known as ‘hot chicken’ is to Nashville what cheesesteak is to Philadelphia. “Oh, bless your heart, that’s what he’s shouting about,” she says, gesturing to her friend, who’s pacing and cursing. “What level d’ya get?” a woman shouts from the next table.
I step out of the family-owned joint - a shabby shack with a sun-faded fish mural - and park myself at a picnic table. Her response is a commonly heard Southern expression that sounds saintly but can also seem faintly disparaging. I’ve just ordered fried chicken legs - hot - with fries and slaw. “Oh, bless your heart,” says the hostess at Bolton’s Spicy Chicken and Fish. This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
0 kommentar(er)
