Since Nashville hot chicken pioneer Bolton Matthews died in 2021, his wife Dollye Graham has stepped away from Bolton’s Spicy Chicken & Fish to concentrate on future ventures. Among them was a new restaurant on Bell Road named Bolton’s Spicy Cafe, which featured a similar menu to her original business and a longer list of Southern side dishes. That restaurant shuttered fairly quickly during the pandemic, but Graham plans to revive it, initially as a “cloud kitchen” concept operating out of Midtown Foods near Marathon Village.
With plans to start up operations in May, Graham is excited to get back into the business. “The original is still up and running, but I plan to rebrand my name with Bolton’s Spicy Cafe,” she explains. “I plan to concentrate more on the meat-and-three part of it in addition to spicy chicken. I’ll offer other meats along with cabbage, mashed potatoes and gravy, mac-and-cheese, broccoli, turnip greens — comfort food!”
She says she needed the time off to develop her strategy going forward. “The grief process is real,” she says in a phone interview. “It’s been two years since Bolton passed, and I want to keep my husband’s legacy alive. But you have to change with the times, and we’re going to accommodate people looking for plate lunches and carry on the traditions.”
She continues, “I want to put smiles on faces again. I miss seeing customers! I’m a people person, and I’ve been doing this 20-something years. I always knew my customers by name, so I’m fixin’ to tie my bootstraps up tight and do it even without Bolton.”
Midtown Foods' cloud kitchen (also known as a ghost kitchen) could be a good way to dip those boots back in the business. Offering small kitchen spaces that restaurants can rent out to prepare food for pick-up or delivery services, Midtown Food is home to more than a half dozen concepts. Graham explains, “You’ll be able to carry out and order from all of the delivery platforms, you just can’t sit down and eat yet. After that, I’ll definitely be looking for a bricks-and-mortar location. I’d like to be in Murfreesboro.”
In addition to hot chicken, Bolton’s has also long been a standard bearer for another iconic Nashville dish, the hot fish sandwich. “We’re gonna be doing it right,” Graham promises. “We’ll have the fish layin’ off the bread like it’s supposed to be! We might bring a slight twist to it, though.”
Graham also has her eyes on a couple of other business possibilities, including the idea that her name and dishes could appear on the menus of other restaurants. She says, “It’d be like a new phase of franchises. I’d be open to that, too.”
She is also planning to develop her own line of spices for retail sale. She jokes, “I’m going to develop a mild spice for those that can’t handle the hot. Our mild is hot — our hot is over-the-top!”
Stay tuned for more information and specific website addresses as these projects go live.
