CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A popular theory runs through the South that one of the great tools of desegregation was food. It’s probably true. Two years ago I spent some time in rural North Carolina studying (well, um, eating) eastern North Carolina barbecue. Wilber Shirley, one of the old-time barbecue pioneers, told me how his barbecue shack brought blacks and whites together around these parts in the ’60s.
Here in Charlotte, they say the same thing about fried chicken. Charlotte is considered one of the soul-food centers of the South. It has been a city since the 1920s with a thriving black middle class that wasn’t going to tolerate lousy food.
The fast-food chain Bojangles, known for its fried chicken, was founded here.
Eating fried chicken is about the only way you know you’re in the South when in Charlotte. This place is business-park hell. It’s one new corporation after another, moving to town into nondescript, boring high-rises like matchsticks. Outside my hotel window here I can see four cranes.
The food choices downtown lean heavily toward the high- end chains catering to the growing number of visiting businesspeople on expense accounts. Morton’s. Capital Grille. Ruth’s Chris.
There’s also a wave of Southern gourmet (no, that’s not an oxymoron) dishes, made from locally grown ingredients, that are absolutely wonderful. My hotel restaurant, the Savannah Red, served Southern fried chicken roulade, one of the best meals I’ve had all year.
Still, my kind of Southern cuisine isn’t high end. It’s shacks by railroad tracks. It’s country diners on quiet two-lane roads with American flags fluttering in the warm wind. It’s the sweet Southern twang bantering among the short-order cooks and waitresses scurrying around linoleum floors.
In Charlotte, which exploded in a business boom in the ’90s, you have as good a chance of hearing someone saying they’re going to “pawk da caw” as you would a good ol’ fashioned “y’all.” Charlotte may be near the South Carolina border but it’s as homogenized as the United Nations. It’s Southern Lite.
To find the Old South in the New South you go to an old chicken joint in Charlotte. I was directed to Price’s Chicken Coop, a Charlotte institution since 1962. I liked it immediately when I saw it really was across from railroad tracks. Those tracks now carry Lynx, Charlotte’s sparkling light-rail system, but all the romance wasn’t lost on me.
The Chicken Coop has no tables. It’s takeout only. I walked in the small brick building that could pass for a laundromat and lines five deep were crammed along a long white counter. About a dozen waitresses and fry cooks ran around flinging chicken and slaw and tater tots and hush puppies into white cardboard boxes.
The mixing of cultures hasn’t changed here. In line with me were teens in dreadlocks, businessmen sans ties, young gals in stylish skirts. They were blacks and whites, old and young, rich and poor, fat and skinny.
I took my box and Coke bought from the soda machine and walked six blocks through the fashionable Dillwood neighborhood to Latta Park. That’s where I plopped down next to a sun-splashed asphalt basketball court and had a little picnic by myself. It was nice. Pathetic but nice.
The food made up for any loneliness. The gargantuan chicken breast and wing were fried to that golden crispiness you always loved about your mom’s. The meat inside was moist but not greasy. Unlike Kentucky Fried Chicken, after this lunch I didn’t need to take a bath.
Yet fried chicken is easy to botch. Try it sometime. I went to another Charlotte institution that should be buried along with the Confederate flag. The Coffee Cup was established in 1948 between a Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Co. plants. Factory workers of both races mixed well here before they did anywhere else.
The building received a historical designation but became too old to handle a restaurant’s 21st-century requirements. The Coffee Cup unfortunately moved this year to a bank building with paid parking. The joint is as sterile as a Chick-fil-A.
That’s not even the bad news. The bad news is the chicken was as awful as any I’ve ever had. Switching from pan-fried to deep-fried, grease singed my tongue with every bite. The green beans were soggy and tasteless, the white rice void of any form of recognizable elements of food. I ate there six hours ago, and if I could write this lying down I would.
And to think this was my birthday meal. Give me a shack in the South any day.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
