My well-traveled friend Matt is one of my best tipsters, teasing me from wherever he finds good food on the road with mouthwatering text messages.
One day, it’s a rave for a Chinese haunt in London; another month, “Guess where I’m having lunch?” is embedded with the image of a perfect pie from Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles.
To ignore his advice, I’ve learned, is to miss out on something special. So recently, when Matt heard that I’d be passing through Nashville, he insisted that I make Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack a priority.
“My best meal of 2007,” he told me over dinner in Washington a full three years later.
Needless to say, a pal and I were at the door of the joint when it opened at noon on a Friday in December, a lot hungry and a tad skeptical.
The name is a reference to the family that runs the establishment, led by matriarch Andre Prince, 65. The air in the place, heavy with Tabasco, hints at truth in the “hot chicken” advertising.
“Shack” is no understatement. The dining room, in a sad shopping strip in east Nashville, is just five faded booths and a card table covered in oilcloth.
There’s no printed menu. The few choices — various cuts of chicken and side dishes — are on a sign above the counter, and you’d better know what you want when you reach the window: plain, mild, medium, hot or extra- hot chicken.
We get some plain for a benchmark and some extra hot for the same reason some people jump out of airplanes: There’s a heady thrill in knowing that however much you’ve trained for it, you may not survive the experience.
Was it my imagination, or did the woman scribbling down my order pause to size me up? Certainly, there was precedence. When Thomas Keller, the visionary behind two of the country’s best restaurants — the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., and Per Se in New York — dropped into Prince’s last spring, he told me, “They would not allow me to try the extra hot” because “I was a virgin to their chicken.”
Keller’s mini-critique: “I must say that the mild was super hot and the hot EXTREMELY so! I cannot imagine what the extra hot was like or even how someone would survive the nuclear explosion on the taste buds!”
Well, let me tell ya, Thomas.
I’m the kind of eater who thinks that jalapeños are for wimps and who always elects to go as hot as it gets on a Thai menu.
Still, I was not prepared for the fire that exploded on my tongue after I picked a piece of breast meat from its cradle of white bread and tugged at the chicken’s gritty-with-spices skin, staining my fingers a dark reddish-brown. My fingers tingled at the mere touch of the seasoning, and my eyes started tearing as the crust got closer to my face.
Ever tasted molten iron? Kissed the sun? Me neither. But “extra hot” at Prince’s is what I imagine those sensations approximate. Like dynamite, the spices from Prince’s most volatile dish explode on the palate, torching every taste bud in their path in wave after wave of assaults. Within seconds, I’m crying, sweating and hiccuping — simultaneously — and the top of my head feels as if a giant Brillo pad is being rubbed across it. For a long moment, I think I’ve committed career suicide, because I can’t taste anything.
Only the next day do I catch the joke about what has been billed as “24-hour chicken.”
Eaten as a cure
At Prince’s, for whatever reason, “mostly women order extra hot,” says the restaurateur, a 31-year veteran of the business. Patrons have told her that they’ve sought out Prince’s chicken as a cure for everything from sinus problems to hiccups.
Andre Prince doesn’t know exactly when her father’s uncle, Thornton Prince, opened Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, and there’s no one alive in the family to confirm her guess that the business probably started in the early ’40s.
The story goes that Thornton Prince stayed out late one Saturday night, returning the next day to find a pan of fried chicken, a Sunday tradition, on his girlfriend’s stove. Except it wasn’t the usual recipe.
To get even with her beau, Prince’s gal had spiked the chicken with a mess of fiery seasonings. But the last laugh was his, says his great-niece. “He liked his whipping” and even asked the flame-thrower to stick with her revised version from then on.
Don’t even think about asking Andre Prince for the recipe. All she’ll share about Prince’s signature is that cayenne accounts for part of the blast, and vegetable oil is the preferred sizzling agent.
As much as she’d like to use only iron skillets, her cooks rely on deep-fryers to keep up with the demand for Prince’s pride.
The secret to just-good- chicken, then? Although preferences differ, Prince likes to cook her bird slowly, so the seasonings have time to be absorbed into the meat, or “get down into it,” as she puts it.
For the record: “I don’t go past mild,” she says.
The Details
Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, 123 Ewing Drive, Nashville. 615-226-9442. Lunch for two about $20.
