Hot chicken

Hot chicken (also called Nashville hot chicken) is a style of fried chicken that originated in Nashville, Tennessee, and has become one of the city's most recognized culinary contributions. Hot chicken is a type of fried chicken that is a local specialty of Nashville. In its typical preparation, it is a portion of breast, thigh, or wing that has been marinated in a water-based blend of seasoning, floured, fried, and finally covered in a paste or sauce that has been spiced with cayenne pepper. This method of preparation originates within African American communities in the Southern United States. From a single family's kitchen in the 1930s, the dish grew slowly within Nashville's Black neighborhoods for decades before becoming a national and international food trend.

Origins and the Prince Family

The founding story of hot chicken is a tale of culinary accident rooted in personal drama. The origins of the dish are unofficially traced back to the kitchen of Thornton Prince in the 1930s, according to his great-great niece, Semone Jeffries, the CEO of Prince's Hot Chicken in Nashville. One Sunday morning in the 1930s, a groggy Thornton Prince rose for breakfast after a late night of carousing. A Sunday morning fried chicken breakfast was tradition in the African American communities in the South, and Thornton's jealous girlfriend — believing he had been unfaithful — was plotting her revenge as she prepared it. Known today only as "Girlfriend X," she doused his chicken with a heavy dose of cayenne pepper to pay him back for his indiscretions.

Instead of being put off, Thornton decided he liked it so much that, by the mid-1930s, he and his brothers had created their own recipe and opened the BBQ Chicken Shack café. He was a pig farmer by day but, along with two of his brothers, found a way to open up "The Bar-B-Q Chicken Shack" on the corner of Jefferson Street and 28th Avenue in north Nashville. The Prince brothers all worked full-time jobs by day, so the restaurant opened at the end of the work day and remained open until midnight and until 4 a.m. on weekends.

Operating solely in some of the poorest Black neighborhoods in the city, the restaurant's location moved three different times before ultimately finding its permanent home in 1989 in a strip mall in East Nashville. Thornton Prince died around 1960 and left the chicken shack to his brother, Will, who then left it to his nephew, Bruce. In 1980, Bruce's daughter André Prince Jeffries became the fourth owner and changed the name to Prince's Hot Chicken to honor her founding great-uncle and immortalize the family legacy. Jeffries renamed the restaurant, saying: "I took out the BBQ because this was never barbecue."

The James Beard Foundation later recognized the restaurant's pivotal role in American food culture. The James Beard Foundation gave Prince's Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish. Timothy Davis, author of The Hot Chicken Cookbook, told NPR that "Prince's is the ground zero of hot chicken."

Preparation and Presentation

A richly pigmented seasoning paste gives the fried chicken its reddish hue. Spice blends, preparation methods, and heat intensity vary depending on the recipe and chef. A typical Nashville-style hot chicken spice paste has two key ingredients: lard and cayenne pepper. Nearly all hot chicken is marinated in buttermilk to impart flavor and to retain the meat's juices upon frying. Some preparations of hot chicken are breaded and fried after application of the spice paste; the more traditional method has the paste applied immediately after the chicken is removed from the fryer.

While the recipe varies by restaurant, it typically consists of a dry rub with a heaping base of cayenne pepper and a proprietary blend of spices unique to the chef preparing it. There is, however, a general consensus on how it is served: on top of one or two slices of white bread for absorbing the spicy juices and a generous side of pickles for a vinegar kick to help with the spice.

When you order authentic Nashville hot chicken, it is almost always served on a slice of plain white bread with a few dill pickle chips on top. The pickles are not just for decoration; they are a crucial part of the experience. The chicken is often so saturated with spicy oil that it drips down, and the slice of bread underneath is perfectly positioned to soak up the fiery, flavorful goodness.

The heat level of Nashville hot chicken can vary dramatically, from mild to extremely hot. Most restaurants offer different spice levels to cater to various palates. The hottest versions can be truly eye-watering, with some restaurants requiring signed waivers for their spiciest offerings.

A variation on the dish also exists in the form of hot fish. Hot fish is typically a breaded and fried whiting or catfish filet prepared using a similar cayenne paste as hot chicken. Some hot chicken restaurants also serve hot fish, but other restaurants may specialize in hot fish alone.

Deep Roots in Nashville's Black Community

For almost 70 years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville's Black neighborhoods. The dish's confinement to those communities was not accidental — it was a direct result of the racial geography of the city. Hot chicken has its roots deeply set in Black communities in Nashville due to the segregation laws that used to be in place. Nashville as a whole was affected greatly by Jim Crow-era laws which divided the city into segments, meaning that food that was popular in one part of the city might not be well-known in another.

That recipe was soon perfected and transformed into a Nashville classic, becoming central to local Black residents' lives, according to Semone Jeffries. Even many white Nashvillians grew up entirely unaware of the dish. Despite its current popularity, many native Nashvillians did not grow up eating hot chicken. Eater writer Zach Stafford explained that while his father would drive a half hour to eat at Prince's, people in the mostly white suburb where he grew up had no idea what hot chicken was.

Prince's also spawned competition from within its own circle. Prince's first real competition happened because the family had a falling out with their cook, Bolton Polk. In the late 1970s, he left to open his own place, which he named Columbo's Chicken Shack, where he served his own version of hot chicken. Polk was eventually forced to close his restaurant in the 1990s; however, he passed down his recipe to his nephew, Bolton Matthew, who honors his uncle's work and legacy through Bolton's Spicy Chicken & Fish.

Food trends expert Kara Nielsen has noted the complicated cultural dimensions of the dish's rise to mainstream fame. Nielsen described the Nashville hot chicken trend as a "controversial topic" because of how it has been appropriated from its origins as a Black-owned local business. Though it began going mainstream about eight years ago, Nashville boasted Prince's Hot Chicken for decades before the broader culture picked it up.

The Music City Hot Chicken Festival and Mainstream Rise

The transformation of hot chicken from a neighborhood staple into a civic symbol gained significant momentum in the early 2000s, driven in large part by former Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell. Nashville hot chicken is celebrated with the Music City Hot Chicken Festival every year on the Fourth of July. The event was founded in 2007 by former Nashville mayor Bill Purcell to honor this uniquely local creation and cement its place in the city's identity. The Music City Hot Chicken Festival is held every Fourth of July weekend in Nashville's East Park. The fact that a hot chicken festival is held in the punishing heat of a Tennessee summer is considered both cruel and appropriate, given the dish's "enjoyable punishment" roots.

The festival, a massive celebration featuring an amateur cooking competition, a fire truck parade, and free hot chicken samples from Nashville's best establishments, has played a significant role in catapulting hot chicken from a neighborhood favorite to an internationally recognized food. It has drawn media attention from across the country, cementing hot chicken's place in Nashville's identity.

More than 12,000 people showed up for the 2014 Fourth of July Music City Hot Chicken Festival.

Nashville's annual Music City Hot Chicken Festival launched in 2007, Hattie B's Hot Chicken came onto the scene in 2012, and when KFC added it to the menu in 2016, it spread out across the rest of the country and "hot chicken" became "Nashville Hot Chicken." In January 2016, fast food chain KFC began selling "Nashville Hot Chicken" and "Nashville Hot Tenders" in its U.S. restaurants, following a trial run in the Pittsburgh area that the company stated was "the most successful product testing in the company's recent history."

According to data from Technomic, a food service research and consulting firm, the Nashville hot chicken trend saw a boost at the onset of the pandemic, with a peak at the end of 2022. From the first quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of that same year, Nashville hot chicken menu mentions saw a nearly 25% increase — and a 65.7% increase over the previous five years.

Notable Restaurants

Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, founded by Thornton Prince in the mid-1930s and operated by André Prince Jeffries since 1980, remains the cornerstone of the hot chicken tradition. There is broad consensus on the respect due to Prince's Hot Chicken Shack. As Hattie B's head chef John Lassater puts it: "Prince's is the godfather of hot chicken, and we can only tip our cap to them."

Hattie B's Hot Chicken, which opened in 2012, became one of the most recognized names in the second wave of hot chicken establishments. After Prince's success took off, other local chefs in the city began starting their own hot chicken restaurants and food trucks as the dish became one of the city's trademarks. The Tennessee city has numerous hot chicken restaurants competing for the top spot, as both locals and tourists flock to get a taste of the dish.

Between 2001 and approximately 2006, the dish even attracted celebrity interest. Country music stars Lorrie Morgan and Sammy Kershaw owned and operated a now-defunct hot chicken restaurant called "hotchickens.com."

The reach of hot chicken has expanded well beyond Nashville and the American South. Reflecting the growing popularity of the dish, many cities in the United States host restaurants that serve hot chicken or a variation thereof, including Atlanta, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Birmingham, Louisville, Ann Arbor, Columbus, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. The appeal of hot chicken has spread beyond the United States, with restaurants in Calgary, Alberta; Seoul, South Korea; and Melbourne, Australia also serving this style of chicken.