population, but white customers began to pay
attention after the restaurant moved to a downtown
location. In the decades since, Prince’s, along with
numerous copycats, have become tourist destinations
in the city and throughout the United States. Nashville
now has a Hot Chicken Festival. And in 2016, KFC
started serving its rendition of hot chicken in more
than 4,000 US locations.
McGlone tasted his first hot chicken in 2012 at
a Prince’s-inspired restaurant in Nashville called
400 Degrees. He’d recently been promoted to chef de
cuisine of Husk Nashville, the sibling to chef Brock’s
celebrated New Southern restaurant in Charleston,
South Carolina. Before arriving in the American South,
McGlone had spent the preceding decade in and out
of the culinary world, cooking for chefs like Alex Atala
in São Paulo and Pierre Gagnaire in Paris. But he also
put in time working on the sets of photo shoots, and as
a security escort and talent scout in the upper echelons
of the fashion world, amassing more than his fair
share of hilarious, terrifying and outrageous experiences
involving Russian models, P Diddy’s New Year’s Eve
party, rock stars and an original Picasso.
Like many chefs, McGlone is a wanderer. New
Zealand is his birth country, but he has rarely stayed
in one place for long. He credits Brock’s impassionedfranchise business under the name Kentucky Fried
Chicken. By marketing his restaurants using his
symbolic status as a non-military “Colonel,” along
with a heavy dose of imagery that evoked slavery-era
plantations, he grew KFC into a multimillion-dollar
company. Later, after Sanders had mostly stepped away
from the business, KFC would swell into the world’s
second largest restaurant brand, with locations in more
than a hundred countries. KFC’s success brought a
version of Southern fried chicken to a global audience.
Almost 70 years after the Colonel opened his first
franchise, and a century and a half after Emancipation,
McGlone, an affable half-Maori, half-Irish sous-chef
working for one of America’s most celebrated Southern
chefs, decided that fried chicken and natural wine was
a pairing that needed to happen. He flew to Australia
armed with a recipe and a business plan.
All of this, for better or worse, is possible because
fried chicken is unequivocally, fundamentally delicious.
At various periods throughout history, fried chicken has
been craved, rejected, heralded, excoriated, belittled,
honoured and exploited – often all at once. The dish’s
exact origins are hard to pin down and, perhaps, beside
the point. A quick survey of the food world reveals
that practically every culture that eats chicken has
come up with a way to crisp birds in hot oil.
In addition to the bone-in, breaded, and pan-fried
chicken ubiquitous in the United States, there’s
twice-fried Korean fried chicken with gochujang,
adobo-rubbed chicken in the Guatemalan tradition,
Japanese karaage seasoned with soy, ginger and garlic,
Brazilian fried chicken, Chinese fried chicken, Thai
fried chicken, and a Keralan-American mash-up with
coriander, mint and serrano peppers popularised
in Atlanta, Georgia, by chef and cookbook author
Asha Gomez. A US trade association estimated that
Americans would consume 1.35 billion chicken wings
in a single day: the 2018 Super Bowl. Many of them
were no doubt served Buffalo-style: deep-fried and
tossed in hot sauce, with a creamy blue-cheese dressing
and batons of celery and carrot on the side.
In 1945, in a black neighbourhood of Nashville
called Hadley Park, Thornton Prince opened Prince’s
BBQ Chicken Shack – today, known as Prince’s Hot
Chicken – the first-ever hot chicken establishment. The
name “hot chicken” is a charmingly matter-of-fact and
apropos descriptor of the dish: chicken breast, legs
or wings dredged in flour and fried, then bombarded
with a proprietary blend of dry seasonings (secret
spice rubs abound when it comes to fried chicken)
that always includes a heavy dose of cayenne pepper.
It’s customarily served atop slices of squishy-soft
white bread to absorb the chicken fat and scarlet-red
seasoning, with sweet cucumber pickles on the side.
An evening and late-night haunt, Prince’s built
its reputation by serving the city’s African AmericanAbove: hot
chicken, sides
and natural
wine at Belles
Hot Chicken
in Fitzroy.78 GOURMET TRAVELLER