Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Even after desegregation, hot chicken remained hidden in plain sight for much of Nashville, due to what Purcell described as “comfort” on both sides of the racial divide.

  “I think in terms of the first 50 years or more, there was a satisfaction by the family and families that were making hot chicken that they were doing something special and worthwhile,” Purcell said. “But they had no particular inclination or desire in those days to franchise it, or move it beyond their own capacity to ensure its quality. And it satisfied them to be that way, and that’s how they proceeded. Not unlike in some ways, aspects of Nashville at that time.”

  Nashville appears to be growing into itself, and growing to accommodate strangers; you can tell from the afternoon congestion on the interstate, where the gridlock is beginning to resemble the kind you’d experience in Atlanta or Austin. “There are a lot of people moving here from California,” Andrew, an Uber driver, told me. “And the traffic is as bad as Los Angeles.” Nashville is different now.

  There’s 2,000 miles between us, but Nashville and I have mutual interests.

  My favorite restaurants could double as a Medieval Times–esque show for misandrists, where the male tears flow like wine. In high school, a group of friends and I ventured to a traditional Sichuanese restaurant just up the street from my school in the city of San Gabriel, a suburb east of Los Angeles where more than 60 percent of residents were Asian as of the 2010 census. We ordered a traditional hot pot full of meats and vegetables covered in a bubbling broth, loaded with dried whole chili pods and anesthetic Sichuan peppercorns, and topped off with what looked like a tanker explosion of crimson chili oil. On a count of three, we all agreed to lean in and inhale deeply. Instantly, everyone at the table broke out into a fit of uncontrollable coughing. It was the most demanding meal any of us had ever eaten. It wasn’t just a memorable lunch, it was one of the best I’ll ever have. These are the kinds of restaurants I’m in constant search of, where what’s being served challenges sensory norms and forces you to reckon with food’s capacity to change you in the moment—not just emotionally, but physically.

  My search brought me to Prince’s, but it didn’t stop there. In planning my journey, I found inspiration in Anthony Bourdain, who had tweeted earlier this year that eating hot chicken was a “three day commitment.” And so that’s what I did. I committed myself to eating at three hot chicken joints in three days, ordering the highest spice level available at each one.

  I realize now that isn’t what Bourdain meant.

  Thursday, 9:28 p.m. // Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack

  Spice Level: XXXHot

  “Boy, I want to see you eat this,” the woman taking my order said.

  Those who order the highest spice level at Prince’s—usually tourists, as there seems to be an unwritten rule as a Nashvillian to never order the extra hot—are almost always discouraged by the staff. Maybe it was the crazed grin I had walking up the counter, but I was met with minimal resistance. “You must have been convincing,” Purcell told me. “Because they will normally not just question the order, but attempt to talk you down.” All I got was an offer of ranch dressing, free of charge. I politely declined.

  Nothing could have surprised me upon first bite, except for what happened: nothing. No tears, no sweat, minimal pain. Maybe I should’ve seen that coming.

  Before career aspirations, before standardized testing—hell, before first grade—I was fixated on increasing my spice tolerance, on fulfilling a family hallmark. As a 4-year-old, I cautiously began dipping my food into sriracha; as a 10-year-old, I was my brother’s sous-chef and designated taste tester, helping him chop habaneros for a salsa at his first college house party; last year, I ate a Carolina Reaper, the hottest chili on the planet, in front of a camera. Two decades of pushing my boundaries had culminated in eating the XXXHot at Prince’s, in front of a petrified couple visiting from Chicago, without a hitch.

  Desensitizing oneself to the burn of chilies broadens the palate. When the sting is no longer a hindrance, it’s easier to focus on actual flavor. Prince’s spice blend is heavily weighted toward cayenne and paprika, among other spices; the earthiness almost reminiscent of nuclear Oaxacan mole. It’s hard to overstate how beautiful this fried chicken is. It glows, with a sheen emanating from every crevice. The flesh itself is perfect; Prince’s specifically is lauded for a clandestine marination technique that begins before the bird ever hits the fryer. Whatever they do in their preparation made that fried chicken the best I’ve ever had, hot or not.

  Was I a little disappointed by the initial heat of Prince’s? Sure. But Jeffries, the great-niece of Thornton Prince, calls her chicken a 24-hour chicken, and she tells no lies. My mouth may not have minded all the cayenne, but my stomach was under siege. The pain wasn’t sharp, like a knife stabbing through you. It was round and blunt, but incessant, like blows from a hammer tenderizing you from the inside. It can do strange things to a person, as my hallucinatory dreams that night would attest. Even I hadn’t escaped the wrath of Prince’s mythic heat.

  There are photos on Yelp of people passed out on Prince’s tables trying to finish their food. Purcell once took a coworker to the restaurant for lunch. The woman behind the window shook her head. His coworker was visibly pregnant. “She can’t have hot chicken,” the employee said. “She’ll have to come back after the baby is born.” Of course, there are also tales of pregnant women who have asked their partners to fetch Prince’s hot chicken for takeout in hopes of expediting the delivery process. Pain is pain, I suppose.

  But the strange mysticism surrounding the business doesn’t end with its alleged childbirth-inducing properties. Prince’s calls a small, bumpy strip mall just off the Dickerson Pike in East Nashville its home, in an area known to be a hotbed for prostitution. And there are countless stories about the role hot chicken plays as an aphrodisiac for locals. Andre Prince Jeffries has seen firsthand the rabid sexual appetite hot chicken can cast upon diners.

  “We do have a lady that comes and she’s been coming for about as long as I’ve been in business, she and others,” Jeffries told the Southern Foodways Alliance in 2006. “And she gets it hot. She brings her suitors down here, different suitors. She comes always on the weekend and she gets it hot. One night, she just couldn’t wait to get out, so the finale was on the hood of a car parked in front of the chicken shack. She’s not the only one.… We just shut our eyes and continue to do our work, what we’re good at. Hey, different things turn different people on.”

  But why? And, more importantly, how? For those answers, we’ll need a quick science lesson. Capsaicin, the compound in chilis that causes a burning sensation, activates a receptor in the body called TRPV1, the same receptor activated when the body comes in contact with anything hotter than 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Capsaicin is a fat-soluble compound, which is normally a tidbit used to tell you to drink milk, not water to quell the heat. But in hot chicken’s case, it explains why the dish is so damn hot. All the capsaicin in the spice mix is drawn out in the oil-based application, so with every bite, the compound floods the receptors in your mouth, effectively signalling to your body that you’ve committed self-immolation.

  The rest of the body responds accordingly. Your temperature increases. You start sweating profusely. The blood vessels in your face begin to dilate to rush blood in and out of the problem site, causing swelling and redness. Snot is dripping from your nose. But then you start to feel loopy. The body thinks it’s on fire, so it unleashes a wave of endorphins to help quell the burning. You start to feel something akin to a runner’s high. The sharp stinging pain will subside, but the rush—and subsequent sense of tranquility—lasts a bit longer.

  But that’s taking into account only one biological process that goes into eating hot chicken. As an imaginary fire envelops the senses, the body processes the fact that you’re eating some of the best fried chicken in the country. “Palatable foods are working on similar reward centers in the brain [compared to drugs like cocaine, amphet
amine, and heroin],” said Matthew Young, a neuroscientist who spent three years researching the effects of MDMA at Emory University. “That’s what makes us like certain foods more than others.” The pleasure and pain of hot chicken comes in layers—in waves. It is a simple dish, but what it inspires in the body is as multivalent as a designer drug.

  All that science still doesn’t explain impulsive sex on the hood of a car in front of an entire restaurant full of people.

  “Based on what I know about the brain and what I know about people, first of all, there are obvious environmental factors involved,” Young said. “I assume people are eating this stuff late at night. I’m assuming they’re eating this stuff after being out and drinking. So if you’re already kind of drunk and your inhibitions are down, and you’re increasing your perceived body temperature by eating this very spicy chicken—all of these things, environmental as well as biological, probably work together to increase the likelihood of two people looking across the table at each other and wanting to get down.”

  Hot chicken’s mythology has grown immensely in the past decade, but it’s hard to divorce the dish’s allure from the over-the-top experiences Prince’s has fostered over its nearly 80 years.

  “It’s funny,” Purcell, the former mayor, said. “It’s a place where nothing seems particularly crazy. It doesn’t matter, somehow, whatever people are saying or doing, it all seems just fine.”

  Friday, 10:20 p.m. // Bolton’s Spicy Chicken & Fish

  Spice level: Extra Hot

  After chatting with people at Nashville bars and restaurants, it seemed that Bolton’s Spicy Chicken & Fish was more often the site of out-of-body experiences. “Yeah, you have to try Prince’s, but I died at Bolton’s,” a bartender told me. “And if you’re going there, get the hot fish.”

  Nashville was recently rated the friendliest city in America, according to Travel + Leisure, so I wasn’t going to ignore the kindness and wisdom of locals. Along with the extra-hot chicken leg, I ordered an extra-hot fried catfish sandwich.

  Bolton’s co-owner Dollye Ingram-Matthews included fish on the menu as a way of preserving one of her cherished childhood memories: the backyard fish fry in her neighborhood, which began to disappear as she grew older. What is placed before you at Bolton’s might seem a bit unorthodox to an outsider: a whole filet breaded and deep-fried, with a healthy dousing of cayenne, raw onion slivers, pickle chips, and a squeeze of French’s yellow mustard between two pieces of plain white sandwich bread, the filet overflowing the sides to a comical degree. It may be a humble dish of humble origin, but it weaves a web of interconnected flavors, textures, and sensations: the cayenne is boosted by the acidic components surrounding it, the delicate crisp of the fish is embraced by the pillowy nature of the bread. After a few beers, and the mile walk from Dino’s in which Gallatin Avenue curves into Main Street, the fish sandwich at Bolton’s feels like destiny.

  The chicken is good, too, though less cosmically aligned. The spice application in Bolton’s is dryer than what you’ll find at Prince’s, akin to a Memphis barbecue dry rub. The individual granules of the spice mixture are visible on a piece of Bolton’s chicken; the residual shake glitters the piece of white bread beneath. The cayenne mixture itself has a brighter heat than Prince’s, and, to my tongue, hotter, too.

  Ingram-Matthews walked by to check on me. “Is that hot enough for you?”

  It would’ve been nice to have a few tears fall out of my eyes, but, yes. I told her it’s hotter than what I ate at Prince’s. “Of course it is,” she replied, with calm certitude. “It’s what we put in it.”

  Bolton’s is a celebration of Bolton Polk, the uncle of Ingram-Matthews’s husband, Bolton Matthews, and his contributions to the proliferation of hot chicken. Polk was the owner of Columbo’s, a hot chicken shack, that, for a time, was Prince’s only worthy competition to the throne. The two businesses shared roots. Polk was the former fry cook at Prince’s before a quarrel with the Prince family had him jumping ship and starting his own business. Grand Ole Opry singer George Morgan was a frequent customer and loved Polk’s chicken so much he had a chemist analyze the spice blend so he’d be able to replicate it at home.

  Purcell remembers Columbo’s well. It was where he had his first bite of hot chicken.

  “I can actually look out the window of my office and see where it was,” he said. The former mayor generally speaks in measured, gentle tones, but is often consumed by his own emotions talking about the city and its food staple. “I remember at that moment thinking that I’d never had anything like this, I don’t think there is anything like this—I think this might be the best thing I’ve ever had. And that’s a memory you hopefully never lose. I haven’t.”

  Purcell’s devotion to the dish over the years led him to plan a Nashville hot chicken festival in 2006 while he was still mayor. It was Nashville’s bicentennial year, and Purcell could think of no better way to celebrate the city than by paying a tribute to one of its great delicacies. Without a tinge of haughtiness in his voice, Purcell credits the hot chicken festival for the dish’s propulsion into a Nashville mainstream cultural hallmark. “I think that the festival itself made it clear to people who haven’t focused on it, or had it, or understood it before, just how unique and special it is—that it is ours,” he said. “That it started here and it will always be ours, as long as we support it and keep it alive.”

  Music City Hot Chicken Festival celebrated its 10th year this summer. It’s held on the Fourth of July every year, and while it may seem strange to want to share a day with the greatest celebration of America, Purcell figured there was no better setting. “It’s one of those times when people are celebrating the nature of their civic relationships,” Purcell said. “[It is] the one day of the year where you could be sure that everybody would be thinking about what it meant to be a person in Nashville, in America.”

  Saturday, 11:40 a.m. // Hattie B’s

  Spice level: Shut the Cluck Up

  It was strange, yet reassuring, to hear Purcell talk about hot chicken as an affirmation of the American spirit. Hot chicken reflects certain attitudes and values about food and culture that I didn’t associate as American. It was certainly an America I’d longed for, but one I wasn’t sure existed—an America that didn’t always process extremes as pure gimmickry. The idea of a “challenging” food bringing people together in an immersive experience was always something I attributed more to my Southeast Asian upbringing.

  It’s not that America doesn’t have a history of chili consumption: The Hatch chili is a staple of New Mexico, and we’ll always have people experimenting with new weapons-grade sauces, but New Mexico chilies aren’t cultivated specifically for heat, and toying with capsaicin extract is more of a sub-subcultural pastime. Hot chicken is an anomaly, a kind of extreme so rarely celebrated by Americans en masse. It’s a dish that outlasted the Great Depression and segregation in America, and lived long enough to see itself become a modern American food trend and symbol of gentrification.

  Just around the corner from Prince’s and a short walk down Dickerson Pike is a KFC. Earlier this year, the chain took hot chicken and ran it through the Colonel’s Transmutation Chamber, delivering KFC’s Nashville Hot Chicken, a castrated product that, by mere mention of the word “Nashville,” is meant to reinforce their modern branding: vaguely Southern, vaguely something.

  Tuesday is hot chicken night at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan. New hot chicken specialists have opened in the New York City, Seattle, and Chicago metropolitan areas this year alone. My first bite of hot chicken came courtesy of Howlin’ Ray’s in Los Angeles. Owner Johnny Ray Zone has worked for Gordon Ramsay, Joël Robuchon, and Nobu Matsuhisa, but found his calling during a brief stint with Sean Brock’s Southern bastion Husk in Nashville, where he was first exposed to hot chicken. Together with his wife, Amanda, he decided to bring a souvenir back to his hometown, initially as a food truck. Now, it’s a limited-hours storefront in a shopping complex in L.A.’s rapi
dly gentrifying Chinatown.

  Stylistically, the chicken at Howlin’ Ray’s is highly influenced by Bolton’s dry application. It’s a spiritually faithful re-creation: Howlin’, the hottest option on their menu, is at least as hot as anything I’ve had from the source. I choked on my first bite of Howlin’ Ray’s hot chicken. My eyes geysered. I lost control of my body. I was in love.

  Hot chicken’s widespread popularity suggests a shift in the national palate. But it’s a dish rooted in a strong sense of place; you’ll always know how to go directly to the source. The most celebrated and emblematic dish of one of the 25 most populous cities in the country is something designed to hurt you. I’d never felt more American than when I was eating hot chicken in Nashville.

  I wanted to make one last stop before boarding my flight back home. Hattie B’s, established in 2012, is one of the newer hot chicken joints in the city; its location in midtown Nashville makes it a tourist-friendly alternative to many other iconic hot chicken shacks. I was skeptical. Hattie B’s was a topic of discussion in nearly all of my Uber rides. On my way to Prince’s, my driver, Hicham, wondered why I wasn’t going to Hattie B’s, which he heard was the best. (Hicham had never tried hot chicken before.)

  On my way back from Prince’s, my driver Eugene and I exchanged our versions of the Thornton Prince fable, and he, too, wondered why, as a tourist, I didn’t try Hattie B’s first. “Well, I’m glad you went to Prince’s,” Eugene said. “The guys at Hattie B’s once sent their workers out to Prince’s to try to steal their marination recipe, try to get that flavor. But they obviously couldn’t.”

  Hattie B’s had been open only 30 minutes, but the line—mostly white, mostly tourists—bent around the restaurant and ran down the street. While there are a few tables in the store itself, most ate from the trendy, raised patio deck. At Prince’s and Bolton’s, there was a sense of familial warmth, the product of years, maybe even generations, of patronage. Hugs were exchanged by members of the community who just happened to stop in for a bite at the same time. Considering that Hattie B’s hasn’t even made to a half-decade of existence, it might be unfair to pit the restaurant against that standard, but in its four years, Hattie B’s already has three locations in two states; Prince’s, after nearly eight decades of serving hot chicken, only recently announced an upcoming second location. Same product, different ethos—though the enterprising spirit Hattie B’s has demonstrated in its franchising is American, too.