On the Midtown picnic tables at Hattie B's, you can enjoy hot chicken while it's still hot
Burnin' Wings of Fire
by Carrington Fox
You'd think the first person to spill too much cayenne into the chicken fryer would have written off the meal as a cautionary tale. Instead, that original glutton for poultry-and-pepper punishment leaned into it, throwing good spice after bad, if you will, until the over-the-top singeing and sunburned recipe emerged as an art form worth perfecting, a philosophy worth defending, a tradition worth celebrating.
A recent local outlet to throw its hat into the expanding ring of hot chicken is Hattie B's, a project of longtime food-service veteran Nick Bishop Sr. and son Nick Jr.
The Bishops have been perfecting their recipes at their Cool Springs eatery, Bishop's Meat & Three, where the hot bird — introduced on a lark — soared to the top of the menu. The Bishops are restaurant veterans, going back another generation to when Nick Sr.'s dad served as CEO of the Morrison's Cafeteria chain. That company's migration into health care food service brought Nick Sr. to Nashville decades ago.
The Bishops' venerable corporate pedigree might help explain the efficient big-company polish on their quaint chicken shack. The first words that pop into your head when you step inside the coop-themed building next to Gigi's Cupcakes are likely to include "clean." Possibly "cute," if you're given to using that word. Chances are, you will not say "gritty." That adjective, often applied to hot chicken enterprises with aging infrastructure, bare-bones menus and limited seating, does not capture the whitewashed picnic tables, playful chicken graphics, or gleaming taps of Yazoo, Jackalope and Fat Bottom.
A phrase that might also spring to mind: "Parking is a bitch." (We had similar feelings about seating, despite the wealth of picnic tables. At Sunday lunch, tables were full — inside by the ordering counter and outside on the tented porch. That meant we had to hold our beverages and stand along the wall until someone left. Here's some backhanded good news: During our long wait, a table finally freed up.)
Fortunately, Hattie B's' sizzling chicken is worth the hassle.
Imagine a meat-and-three with a tight roster of housemade sides, where the only meat is fried chicken, in various shades of heat. There's mild, medium, hot, damn-hot and shut-the-cluck-up. We'll get to the hot, but first, let's talk about the chicken, because the sting doesn't mean a thing if the bird doesn't sing.
Bottom line: Hattie B's holds its own among local fried chicken favorites, hot or otherwise. Furthermore, the tenders are among the most full-bodied and fresh we have found.
Sure, it took a full 20 minutes from order to delivery (the wait was much shorter at lunch on Tuesday), but the basic Southern, i.e. non-spicy, chicken arrived at the table sizzling and shiny, skin peeling off in thin sheets, with a glassy, oily finish on one side and a sandy crispness on the other. Beneath the decadent bronzed skin, meat was plump and bountiful, perspiring with sultry, buttery chicken liquor.
Now, for the heat.
Mild is indeed very mild, with a bashful brushing of sauce on the basic Southern model.
For medium, the basic Southern gets dunked into a bath of cayenne-tinged glaze, which imparts a red glow to the bronzed bird.
Hot starts off like medium, with a dunk, then it gets dusted with damn-hot seasoning and polished so the excess spice comes off.
In the extreme levels of damn-hot and shut-the-cluck up, it's a whole new ball game. There's baptism by fire in a searing red sauce with traces of ghost pepper and habanero, but there's also a generous dry rub of spices and brown sugar, which melds into a paste and lends a velvety texture to the sweet heat.
Our consensus was that medium was the Goldilocks' porridge of Hattie B's, i.e. just right.
Don't misunderstand me — I can eat hotter. I just don't want to. I tend to suspect that too much spice is intended to distract from something else, and given that Hattie B's' excellent fried bird needs no decoy, I see no point in punishing sinuses or GI tract with excessive capsaicin.
If, however, you find yourself in a position to defend your heat-tolerance honor in terms of sheer Scoville units, take these salving side items into consideration: Red potato salad with a light base of mayonnaise goes a long way toward soothing the shut-the-cluck-up sting, as does a creamy spoonful of buttery mac-and-cheese dotted with pimientos. Less helpful are the ubiquitous crinkle fries. If you're living right, you'll land on a day when bacon-cheddar grits are on the menu board.
As for dessert, there's a predictable roster of meat-and-three favorites, including banana pudding and so-called seasonal cobbler, if you consider peaches seasonable in January. But those confections paled in comparison to the supreme frozen concoction, a root beer float, which is quite possibly the perfect accompaniment to hot chicken. Conventional wisdom advises to beware the fire and the fizz, since carbonation propels the pepper across the delicate mucosal tissue. But a root beer float bucks the CW, using bubbles to distribute the soothing cream across the tongue, simultaneously cooling and calming the fire.
In fact, a root beer float may be Hattie B's greatest contribution to the hot chicken canon. And while Hattie B's might never overthrow the icons of the genre, including Prince's, it might help raise the profile of this lovably lowbrow delicacy. Here's why: All too often, hot chicken establishments suffer from a lack of seating, which means much of the product gets consumed off-premises. By then, the bloom is somewhat off the rose. More precisely, the sheen is off the skin. Hattie B's offers a rare and welcome opportunity to enjoy bird fresh from the fryer, and therefore might offer a glimpse of how good hot chicken can be, when it is actually hot.
Hattie B's serves lunch and dinner 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. Takeout and delivery are available.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
Related Locations
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Hattie B’s Hot Chicken
- 112 19th Ave. S.,, Nashville Broadway/ The Gulch/ Music Row/ West End TN 37203
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678-4794
- hattieb.com
- (based on 2 user reviews)
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