Nashville hot chicken is the spicy fried chicken dish that people associate with Music City. Its fiery red outside and delicious taste have made it a famous food in Nashville and a cult favorite across the country. But there is a story behind its huge popularity that is shrouded in mystery and debate. Who really came up with the first Nashville hot chicken, and which restaurant today comes closest to that original idea?
The journey to unravel the genesis of this spicy delicacy is a fascinating glimpse into Nashville’s rich culinary history, the importance of family food traditions, and the complexity of establishing definitive authorship of recipes that evolve over time.
The Central Role of the Prince Family
Most hot chicken tales lead back to the Prince family – stalwart stewards of the dish for over 70 years. According to legend it originated in the 1930s with Thornton Prince III whose girlfriend (or scorned wife, depending on the version) served him excessively spicy fried chicken as revenge for his cheating ways. Instead of deterring him, Thornton apparently loved it, pioneering what became known as hot chicken.
He launched Nashville’s first hot chicken restaurant, Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, originally named BBQ Chicken Shack. His great-niece, André Prince Jeffries, now runs the restaurant, staunchly guarding the secret recipe.
Without the Princes, hot chicken might not have taken flight. They turned an accidental dish into a booming business and Nashville mainstay. However, it’s unlikely Thornton invented hot chicken in a vacuum. Other influences likely contributed to the initial spark of inspiration.
Multiple Claimants in a Broader Culinary Context
Some challenge the Prince family’s monopoly on hot chicken’s origin story. Oral histories suggest Thornton may have adapted existing recipes, rather than spontaneously inventing the dish. West African traditions of heavily spiced chicken stew, introduced by slaves, potentially laid the foundation.
During the Great Depression, Nashville home cooks got creative with cheap ingredients like chicken. It’s possible that other people had the same idea about spicy fried chicken at the same time as Thornton.
Without documented evidence, it’s difficult to credit hot chicken’s invention to any single individual. Thornton Prince undoubtedly popularized the dish, but many likely had a hand in shaping it over time. Nashville’s broader African American culinary heritage was the fertile ground allowing hot chicken to take root.
Preserving Origins: Which Restaurant Comes Closest Today?
There are many claims and influences on hot chicken, so is it possible to get something close to the “original”? Most signs point back to Prince’s. The family zealously guards their time-honored preparation process. They stick to quality standards and make sure the dish stays true to the dish’s spirit, if not to the exact early specifications.
In addition to seasoning, the way they fry the food (using cast iron skillets submerged in lard) gives it a unique flavor. André Prince Jeffries’s fiery personality has made Prince’s even more of an authority. Her tenacious advocacy ensures no imitators dilute the dish’s legacy.
Other Nashville establishments put their own spin on hot chicken. Hattie B’s, Bolton’s, Pepperfire – each has strengths, garnering local devotees. However, none match the heritage and authenticity of Prince’s. To taste how hot chicken emerged from murky origins to gain global fame, Prince’s is the pilgrimage point.
The Evolution Continues
The origins of hot chicken remain deliciously mysterious. While the Prince family undoubtedly catalyzed its rise, many influences shaped the iconic dish. Tracing a singular point of invention may be futile when a recipe evolves gradually through the hands of many.
This communal evolution continues, as cooks add new twists and interpretations. But hot chicken’s soul – crispy chicken smothered in mouth-scorching spice – remains intact. Each Nashville restaurant carries on a distinct tradition, together ensuring hot chicken’s fiery legacy burns bright. After nearly a century, the hunt for hot chicken’s definitive origin story persists, but the delight at each spicy bite unites us all.
Rachel Martin left her hometown for eight years, then returned to find everyone talking about a dish she’d never heard of or eaten in the Nashville of her youth: hot chicken. Today, we learn how Nashville’s signature dish stayed hidden for decades in the city’s black communities — and then suddenly became a global obsession.
It’s on the list of “must-try” Southern foods in countless publications and websites. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge and even Australia advertise that they fry their chicken Nashville-style. More than 12,000 people showed up for the 2014 Fourth of July Music City Hot Chicken Festival. The James Beard Foundation recently gave Prince’s Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish.
But even though I was born and raised in Middle Tennessee and my dad is from Nashville, I had never eaten or even heard of hot chicken until I moved away for graduate school in 2005. I came back eight years later to a new Nashville that eats new food.
The city is growing almost faster than developers can manage. Historic neighborhoods are being razed and renewed. The suburbs are expanding. Fields are being replaced by paved shopping paradises identical to those spreading across the nation. My friends have moved to the neighborhoods we grew up avoiding. They asked me to meet them for drinks or haute Southern cuisine in places I remembered as industrial wastelands. And everyone was eating hot chicken, a food I didn’t know.
Embarrassed that I didn’t know this food everyone else loved, I turned to Google. Picture after picture showed fried chicken with a hot sauce that made it stay crispy, served on white bread with a pickle on top. Then last summer, my friend Julie moved home. She called me.
“What’s hot chicken?” she asked. “Have we been eating our chicken wrong all these years?”
I asked my dad if he had ever had it. “Nope,” he said. But he taught school in the 1970s, and he remembered that some of the black teachers carried their own bottles of hot sauce. Sometimes they’d prank him by spiking his cafeteria lunch.
I asked Denise, an older African-American woman at my church who grew up in the city, if this was the answer. Was hot chicken a part of the city’s history that I had missed as a white woman?
“Of course you didn’t eat hot chicken,” she said, shaking her head at me. “Hot chicken’s what we ate in the neighborhood.”
I went to the Downtown Public Library to do a very unscientific survey of what they had on hand. I sat in their second-floor reading room, surrounded by stacks of cookbooks, just to see if I could find a recipe to prove that in Nashville we didn’t choose our chicken style based on race. I walked away with several new ways to fry a chicken. One of them added some black pepper, but none of them made it spicy.
Sure enough, as I started investigating, I discovered Denise was right. For almost 70 years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville’s black neighborhoods. I started to suspect the story of hot chicken could tell me something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city tries to figure out what it will be in the future.
When I came back home in 2013, Nashville was more than 10 percent larger than it had been when I left less than a decade earlier, and it’s surrounded by communities that have grown by as much as 44 percent.
The tourist strip is busier and glitzier than ever. High rise condominiums have popped up among the business buildings. A new symphony center hosts concerts, speakers and community events. The Nashville Convention Center and the Music City Center draw thousands of people to town every weekend. The Bridgestone Arena seats close to 20,000 people and is home to the Nashville Predators hockey team, which has shocked their hometown and become a competitive club. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the Titans these last few seasons.
Even more surprising to me, my friends live in East Nashville, a region of the city I remember as having a few antiquated businesses, many abandoned houses and large public housing complexes.
East Nashville’s development was partially Mother Nature’s fault. Tornadoes struck Nashville in April 1998. One of them swept through downtown. Another one devastated the neighborhoods of East Nashville. Three hundred homes were destroyed. A Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team formed to make suggestions for how to redevelop and rehab that quadrant of the city. They recommended creating public/private partnerships, building infrastructure tying the neighborhoods to downtown, creating design guidelines and encouraging investment.
“The two greatest treasures East Nashville offers are its diversity and authenticity,” they wrote in their final report. “Throughout the nation, new ‘neo-traditional’ communities are being planned and developed in the hope of replicating the feeling that this community offers.”
Today, East Nashville’s crime rates are falling. New magnet and charter schools are commandeering the public school buildings. Some historic homes are being carefully restored. Others are being razed and replaced with new, high-priced developments. Restaurants and coffee shops and boutique clothing stores form the heart of new, trendy business districts catering to a hipster crowd.
The improvements are billed as helping the entire community, but they are coming at a cost to the people who have lived there for generations. Many of them are getting priced out of their homes. Some of the black residents whose ancestors first settled East Nashville are being forced into the suburbs where whites used to live. Others are ending up in overcrowded, low-income pockets of the city.
In this era of change and loss, residents and visitors alike are anxious to celebrate what is historic about the town. Hot chicken has become shorthand for the area’s various traditions, a de rigueur part of being from here.
Nashville’s Original Hot Chicken Is From Prince’s, A Legendary Family Restaurant
FAQ
Who was the original Nashville hot chicken?
Thornton Prince’s great niece, Ms. Andre Prince Jeffries, is still serving the legendary dish that Nashvillians crave. In the last few years, the hot chicken trend has caught on like wildfire throughout the South, but Prince’s Hot Chicken is the original and remains the gold standard for hot chicken.
What is the most famous Nashville hot chicken?
The most famous Nashville hot chicken restaurant is generally considered to be Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, the original creator of the dish, according to Prince’s Hot Chicken.
Which hattie b’s is the original?
What is the original Prince’s hot chicken location?
… and he found the dish popular enough with friends and family to warrant opening his first restaurant in the mid-1930s at 28th Avenue and Jefferson StreetDec 20, 2018.