As part of its rebranding, Kentucky Fried Chicken has added a new item to its menu this week, signature dish from right here in our city is now on the menu at KFC–hot chicken!
With the rollout of the Nashville Hot Chicken on the menu, KFC has two offerings: Nashville Hot Chicken and Nashville Hot Tenders. “The Colonel’s latest creation was inspired by one of Nashville’s most famous dishes. It’s spicy, smoky, crispy chicken that’s bold and full of flavor,” states the KFC website.
Nashville Hot Chicken was added to the menu after a successful test market in Pittsburgh with KFC stating “the most successful product testing in the company’s recent history,” reports Time Magazine.
Time Magazine spoke to notable Nashvillians, including the owner of Prince’s Hot Chicken, the originators of hot chicken and here’s what they report:
“It’s a very good thing, good for Nashville and good for hot chicken, whatever we can do to focus the attention of America on our city and on our special indigenous food,” says Bill Purcell, Nashville’s former mayor and the founder of the annual Music City Hot Chicken Festival. “Once people know about it, they’ll want to come here, try the original, and we’ll see a great spike in our population.”
Mayor Megan Barry, was similarly welcoming, although she couldn’t resist a small dig at the Louisville-based chain. “Hot chicken is uniquely Nashville and delicious, so who can blame KFC for wanting to recreate it?” she said in an e-mail. “But KFC is missing one ingredient in their Nashville Hot Chicken – there’s no Nashville!”
Nashville’s hot chicken purveyors were more skeptical. “I wish them the best, but I don’t really think it will change anything for us because Nashville hot chicken has to be bought in Nashville,” says Dollye Ingram-Matthews, the manager of Bolton’s Spicy Chicken & Fish and a 17-year veteran of the hot chicken trenches. “When you’re doing it locally, it’s a pinch of this and a pinch of that, but when you’re doing mass production, that’s hard to do when you got a bunch of strangers doing it every day.”
As the legend goes, to get revenge on her cheating partner, a woman cooked him painfully spicy chicken. But the man, Thornton Prince III, wound up loving the dish so much that he fine-tuned his own recipe and opened a restaurant in the 1940s to serve it. Now known as Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, that restaurant is credited with pioneering hot chicken and is still run by members of the Prince clan. When asked what she thought about KFC following her family’s lead, André Prince Jeffries, the proprietor of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, said simply, “Come eat at Prince’s Hot Chicken.”
See the video below introducing KFC’s Nashville Hot Chicken.
https://youtu.be/TytOVpD3FAE More Food & Wine Here
