Party Fowl Lends its Recipe to a Hot Chicken Potato Chip

The people at Lay’s think you are spending your pandemic at home eating chips while talking to your friends and fam on Zoom …

… well, OK, maybe they’re not wrong about that.

This week Lay’s introduced five “limited-edition” potato chip varieties, each with an iconic flavor from a different city, including Nashville. So you can continue your Netflix-binging snacking with a local spice, which, of course, is hot chicken. The recipe comes from Party Fowl, which is not the original spicy Nashville bird (that would be Prince’s Hot Chicken). But Party Fowl does sell a lot of Pepsi Products (Lay’s is owned by PepsiCo) and has four locations in Middle Tennessee (SoBro, Donelson, Cool Springs and Murfreesboro) — and they are thrilled to receive a $25,000 “Lay’s Gratitude Fund” donation that Lay’s is giving to each of the five Flavor Icons restaurants. The idea is that each restaurant company could use the funds as needed to help during the pandemic.

Party Fowl owner Austin Smith says he teared up when he heard that his small local chain had been selected. Some of his staff lost homes or suffered damage during the March tornadoes, in addition to the coronavirus-related losses, so the $25,000 will be the start of a new employee emergency fund to help staff now and in the future.

The process of capturing hot chicken in a chip took some back-and-forth. “We started with medium, because that has the widest range of flavor, but it is not so hot that someone would not want to continue eating the chips,” Smith says.

The Party Fowl team tasted the first run and sent in some notes. The eventual winner has the right smokiness and flavors, he says: “The main language hot chicken speaks is cayenne, cayenne and cayenne, and then the heat comes at the end. And then you want another chip and another chip.”

The other restaurants in the limited edition are New York Style Pizza, inspired by Grimaldi’s in New York; Philly Cheesesteak, inspired by Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia; Wavy Carnitas Street Taco, inspired by El Torito in Los Angeles; and Lay’s Chile Relleno, inspired by Cocina Azul in Albuquerque, N.M. 

The chips are on sale at Kroger and other retailers, as well as at all four Party Fowl locations, which are open according to the different city and county pandemic regulations.

Smith, who says he learned his way to hot chicken from Prince’s and Bolton’s and a period when he lived near Hot Stuff in Antioch, is chuffed to be the brand on the bag. “It is an honor to represent the food genre. I never thought in all my days would have a Lay’s potato chip.”