Who serves the best gorditas in Mexico City? Or Baltimore’s can’t-miss crab cakes? Welcome to Taste of the Town, where we call on a local expert to share the best versions of one of their city’s most iconic foods. Here, we take a walk on the scorching side with Nashville’s most electrifying hot chicken.
Hot chicken is enshrined in Nashville’s culinary canon, having been honed in the city’s Black neighborhoods for nearly 80 years. But it didn’t hit prime time until 2007, when the inaugural Music City Hot Chicken Festival set off a series of events that ultimately catapulted the dish into the national spotlight. In the intervening years hot chicken appeared at restaurants spanning LA to NYC, even earning a controversial spot on KFC’s menu in 2016. But the truest way to experience the dish remains a visit to Nashville.
Hot chicken is fried chicken coated with a thin-but-deadly cayenne pepper paste bolstered with lard or vegetable oil, with noted variations laced with paprika, garlic, and black pepper. Usually served in quarter parts, the fiery pieces arrive atop white bread and are anointed with pickles. (Exact recipes are fiercely guarded, so good luck finding an ingredient list.) The Nashville mainstay is a spicy foil to the city’s milder tradition, the meat-and-three, which frequently centers fried chicken that doesn’t deliver a punishing heat known to linger in the esophagus for days.
Spice levels are chosen by diners, which begin on the shallow end with “Southern” (no heat) and “mild.” On the far other side of the spice continuum, every restaurant has its own choice words for a hallucination-inducing level of hot, like “Shut the Cluck Up” at Hattie B’s or “XXX Hot” at Prince’s. Most include a warning of no refunds and a stern caution to know the limits of one’s own taste buds—something too many poor souls choose to ignore.
Multiple locations
There’s no hot chicken without Prince’s, plain and simple. According to Nashville lore, the dish was first concocted by a scorned lover of original owner James Thornton Prince III. Instead of wailing in agony after sampling the vengefully spiked bird, Prince fell in love with it and founded the BBQ Chicken Shack in 1945. Prince’s has changed locations and names over the years (great-niece André Prince Jeffries dropped the “BBQ” after taking over in 1980), although the recipe has remained unchanged (and undisclosed). Beyond its South Nashville digs, Prince’s now has outposts downtown and in the Nashville airport. All remain family-run and deliver spice levels bordering on face-melting.
