10 Reasons Why Nashville-style Hot Chicken is Having a Moment
As I’m a dude who wrote a well-received book on Nashville-style Hot Chicken (link here, or available at your favorite bookseller), there are two questions I get asked more than any other.
If it’s a person on the street, say, or someone new to the preparation, the question is this: “So, what’s your favorite Hot Chicken restaurant?” (I usually demur, and/or offer up five or so can’t-miss joints. Hot Chicken — at least in Nashville — is a pretty self-policing dish.)
If it’s a journalist, the question is this one: “Why now for Hot Chicken? What about this dish is causing it to take off on menus around the country (and indeed the world)?”
And a good question it is. So, after some thought — and not a little greasy-fingered “research” — I’ve settle upon 10 reasons (handy, that!) that I can live with. They are:
1. A rapacious, ravenous food media. As Andrew Zimmern noted in my interview with him, “You have an underfed food media out there, throwing up stories at a pace at which that is unprecedented in any other time. The minute that the food freaks started to get a little traction down there, it was just a matter of time before this was the next big thing.” Two kinds of books are recession-free, goes the old saw: children’s books and cookbooks. You can argue the same for food media as a whole.
2. A helluva origin story. Otherwise known as the Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack legend. A philandering husband. A girlfriend’s revenge, taken from what, at the time, was seen to be her “place”: the kitchen. The last-second twist that he actually enjoys his punishment, so much so that he sets out to bring it to the masses: it’s so perfect, it almost — almost — seems created out of whole cloth. Does the lobster roll have such a story? I think not.
3. It’s an “experience” food that lends itself to social media, video technologies, etc. Going to get Hot Chicken is different from going to get a hamburger or slice of pizza. You don’t tend to ‘gram or Vine your reaction to a cheeseburger, excepting perhaps you’re at Holeman & Finch or In-N-Out Burger. Most people’s first experience with Hot Chicken is something of a dare — it’s only a few days later that you realize there’s a lot more to it than sheer Scoville units.
4. Hot Chicken slots nicely into the current slow food/artisanal/small batch “moment.” In today’s instant-gratification culture, there’s a certain draw to things you can’t rush, and to things made by hand, and moreover to things made by hand by people who live in the same burg as you. There’s a reason people wait in line for an hour or more at Prince’s and Hattie B’s and 400 Degrees, and it’s because the end product is worth it. “Good things come to those who wait,” indeed.
5. Nashville’s nouveau reputation as an ‘it city’. Nashville’s current cache is not to be understated in the rise of Hot Chicken. The recipient of miles of column inches and reams of TV and Web coverage over the last three or four years, Nashville’s turn in the spotlight also means a star turn for its iconic native dish. “Nashville has a very deep and widening culture, there’s the intersection of music and food there, it’s a famous Southern town with a great history, and it has a booming tourism capacity,” says Zimmern. “It’s a natural.”
6. The “Secret Recipe” factor. People like mysteries. The fact that every restaurant’s Hot Chicken preparation is a closely-guarded secret — especially Prince’s — creates intrigue. People like solving mysteries, and teasing out their own preparations. Add in the origin story, and you have all kinds of things for people to pontificate on.
7. Nashville as tourist Mecca. Folks visit here, folks take it back with ’em. (Or the story of it, at least. Hot Chicken doesn’t travel well.)
8. Cultural ambassadors aplenty. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of touring artists who call Nashville home. There are also hundreds of venues to play in Music City proper for out-of-towners. Each is another opportunity for the gospel to spread itself.
9. Done right, it’s undeniably delicious. There’s a reason Hot Chicken has taken off and not, say, the also-traditional Nashville Spice Round (a cooked round steak cured and spiced with salt, red pepper, brown sugar, allspice, and cloves). (Spoiler: it’s because Hot Chicken tastes better.)
10. Spicy/more “extreme” foods are en vogue. As national palates are being conditioned to handle spicier foods thanks to a growing market of hot sauces and chile-laced snacks, the popularity of flamin’ Hot Chicken is a natural progression. The numerous outside influences to our native cuisines — many from cultures more used to spicy food than our own — also deserve mention. As food cultures age, they usually tend towards spicier complexity. And few things are spicier, and at the same time complex, as Nashville-style Hot Chicken.
