Propaganda by Proletariateats

Every displaced Southerner I know has her own panacea for homesickness.  For some, it’s a spoonful of Duke’s mayonnaise, eaten in secret, and often at midnight, by the light of an open refrigerator door.  For others, it’s a cat’s head biscuit, slathered in bacon grease, and soaked in Crystal hot sauce, that allays all longing for home.  But for this native Virginian, whose young life was long-scented with flowering magnolia and wisteria vine, and who now finds himself marooned in the brick-and-mortar megalopolis that is Chicago, my yearning for home is always cured by this:  the Nashville hot chicken sandwich from Fry the Coop on Chicago Avenue.

I know what you’re thinking:  no way could a restaurant in Chicago ever replicate a dish so uniquely southern, so distinctly Nashvillian, as to eponymously bear its central-Tennessee town of origin; no way could some carpetbagging culinarian from Chicago (Fry the Coop owner, Joe Fontana, in this case) ever crack hot chicken’s secret code and divine those secrets known only to those progenitors of the dish at Nashville’s Prince’s, or Bolton’s, or Hattie B’s.

I hear you, but cynics take heed:  Chicago’s Fry the Coop so well succeeds at Nashville hot chicken not for the way it tries to mimic the flavor profile of its Southern counterparts, but for the way it observes Nashville’s time-honored orthodoxy that guides the strictures of process in the making of its fabled chicken.  Fry the Coop first dredges its chicken breasts in buttermilk and seasoned flour, and then fries the breast in beef tallow.  After frying, the chicken is quickly dunked in rendered in beef fat and seasoned with a choice of a spice mix that ranges from the faintly spicy to the mind-meltingly hot.  The result is chicken that is simultaneously crispy, juicy, and deeply, deeply unctuous.  It tastes like chicken that rode a cow through a ring of raging hell fire.  And that, my friends, is the highest praise I can give any sandwich. 

When it comes to what I order, mine is always the “Crazy Hot” version of the sandwich.  An apt description if there ever was one, for its dry-rub is made from Trinidad Scorpion Peppers, and the pleasure/pain intervals that rub produces in its eater feels like a Scovillean spanking machine.  It’s the kind of heat that calls water into your eyes for the way it hurts oh, so good.     

Adept at frying chicken as Fry the Coop is, it’s what happens to the breast meat after cooking that makes their hot chicken so divine.  The fried-and-seasoned breast is topped with house-made slaw, and then set between a butter-toasted Martin’s potato roll, to whose bottom bun has been added house-made, bread-and-butter pickles, and a sauce made (I suspect) from mayo, ketchup, and chopped pickles.  The result is a sandwich that achieves culinary equipoise through the absolute perfect balance of acid and cream, salt and sweet, heat and coolness.  It’s an astonishing trick, this congruency of complimentary contrasts, and it makes for the rarest culinary of experiences:  the yin-yang of absolute balance in a dish. 

Eat the “Crazy Hot” version of the sandwich as I do, and you’ll leave Fry the Coop feeling just a bit more Southern than when you first arrived, and always yearning for more, more, more.  

Contact: christopher@proletariateats.com