Two skeptics search for the soul of Nashville by way of its most famous dish.
Reported in Nashville, May 2026.
I.
Cara Eaton
If you’re not a fan of country music, and we’re not, you’ll find yourself unmoored in Nashville with no raison d’être—swallowed by booming live music reverberating from every bar and restaurant in Nashville’s downtown, with chances of reprieve looking dim. But there must be some soul behind the scene—a scene replete with tacky cowboy hats, hordes of bachelorette parties, and twangy bar covers of 90s hits.
To begin our journey into Nashvillian culture, we focused on gastronomy. But first, of course, we thrifted a tacky American-flag cowboy hat for a Brit stranded at his cultural antipodes.
The concept of Nashville has evolved far from the bygone era of riverfront warehouses, soul clubs, and soul food joints on Jefferson Street. Commercialization and gentrification proliferate, and it’s not surprising to arrive at a litany of “elevated Southern” chains hawking $30 hot chicken plates. Hot chicken has become a trendy food item for the likes of white millennials, and it felt like an acceptable first meal for two weary travelers with just the right amount of untainted post-flight hope.
So, there we were at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, credited with inventing the dish (though the story is family legend, and some will tell you there was a place called Bo’s first). Specifically, we were at the location inside Assembly Food Hall at Fifth + Broadway. Hopes for a homegrown, soulful experience diminished upon immediately encountering a gaudy bar trading on Dolly Parton’s name inside the building. The Prince’s counter was indistinguishable from that of any old mall food court Popeye’s. It wasn’t terribly busy. Curiously, hundreds of tourists were flocking to Hattie B’s, Nashville’s most popular hot chicken location, right around the corner.
It’s hard to review Nashvillian food in the moment; in fact, it’s hard for coherent thoughts to form at all in the bustle of Broadway—Nashville is not a place for the overly critical or overly sober, and we quickly realized we might be alone in our cynicism (that is, until we later ducked into a British-themed pub which proudly advertised No Live Music—Thank God!)
Prince’s hot chicken was hot. Extremely hot. As advertised, I suppose. We weren’t completely certain what exactly we had eaten, and we figured Hattie B’s might hold the secret. We were not versed in Hattie B’s history, falsely assuming it was a Black-founded and operated joint like Prince’s. We were hungry and therefore sensorially optimistic. Neither of us is too deterred by spicy food, both of us being adventurous eaters beyond what our English/New England (New English?) roots may belie. But once again, we found pain. Our second go-around confirmed it: this heat is cosmic, transcendental.
I was expecting an easily consumable, palatable dish based on hot chicken’s gentrified status, but it is truly overwhelming, and overwhelming in a way where the heat is so total I could not tell you anything substantial about the chicken underneath. Is this a failure of the dish, or of my palate? To my mind, hot chicken is more of a rite of passage, an easy way to flex on your friends with your superior spice tolerance, much like trying to impress a fellow house party guest by downing a double shot of Fireball. We didn’t feel impressed with ourselves. We felt sick.
The appeal, however, is not lost on me. When your mouth is burning from cayenne-soaked chicken, your ears are ringing from the mishmash of live country music from surrounding joints, and your throat is afire from a shot of Jack Daniel’s, that’s something unique. It’s worth asking where that something came from.
A glimpse of hot chicken’s history reveals it as a dish with deep roots in Nashville’s Depression-era African American communities, as Prince’s founder, Thornton Prince, found success with affordable, filling soul food. (Meat and three is a culinary staple that took root around the same time among similar communities, but it’s hard to define because of its variability, and it has spread throughout the entire Southeast—and I’m glad to return to it this fall semester.) Hot chicken, on the other hand, is characteristically Nashville and seems to attract a different clientele: tourists, Yanks, and white folk interested in dipping their toes into soul food. Like us.
Thornton Prince’s great-niece has been running the joint since 1980. I found this out afterward, on my phone, inside a mall shop with vintage cowboy gear and $6 Jello shots.
Nashville is growing as a city in precisely this direction. The city’s white and Hispanic residents have made the largest leaps in growth between 2010 and 2020, while Black growth lagged. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition has named it the U.S. city experiencing the most “intense” gentrification. Hot chicken is finding more love, seeing a nearly 25% increase from Q1 to Q2 alone in 2020, notably at a time when non-native Tennesseans (especially Californians) were flocking to the city amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s financial effects on homeowners. Whether any of that survives a $30 chicken plate handed across a quick-service counter is a harder question, and I don’t think a three-night trip qualifies me to answer it.
Anyway, I learned this much: A plate of hot chicken defies its simplicity in the meaning it holds for a yuppie consumer.
II.
Oscar Baum
Like the neon lights of Broadway, Nashville Hot Chicken reels you in with its gaudy, rouge crust and impossible gloss. Hot chicken is, unsurprisingly, hot, but it exudes heat before it even touches your lips. With its deep, angry color and smoky, hearty scent that lingers in the air, it’s a respite from the stale aircon, soft grey hues, and the sedating intercom chimes at 35000 feet. It’s no wonder it pulls in swathes of ignorant tourists, who have stumbled off a plane just that morning, sun-drunk and high on honky-tonk and keen to sink their teeth into the flesh of the city.
As we too stumbled off the plane and made our way downtown, we feasted our senses on the din of Broadway. Walking the strip was surreal. You try to move swiftly so as not to get swept away in the ebbs and flows of foot traffic. You cut past a gaggle of tourists dressed like cowboys and troops of cowboys dressed like tourists. You pull your shoulders to narrowly avoid this man on a hoverboard who’s wielding a python and barking at girls for selfies and money. You push yourself forward into the jaws of mayhem, ignoring the pleas from beggars and hails from promoters until you find yourself stopping at another intersection.
In this brief lull, you surface from the chaos to take a breath, but looking around, you see the same neon lights, the same bars, and the same faces. You hear the same eerie choir of one hundred country-rock covers and the supporting low murmur of engines idling. You wince at the same mocking car horns and motorcycle revs. They snap for your attention and keep you alert, unacclimatized. The hustle is inescapable. You look down the strip to see how far you have to go, but it’s as though you haven’t moved an inch. Broadway stretches out ceaselessly to mingle with the southern sun, settling into a hazy mirage on the horizon, and outer Nashville becomes a distant dream.
Seeking some relief, we had dived into a slightly quieter bar and made for the rooftop. From a bird’s-eye view, Broadway was a different story. The twangy guitars were drowned in the sheer scale of the city, which basked in the golden light of the evening. Strings of pickup trucks and taxis moved in their synchronized dance, north to south, chasing east to west. Each car winked as it caught the sun, before curling onto the highway and fading, becoming the blood of the city. The birds around us marbled the ivory sky with streaks of black and silver, coloring the scene with shrill melodies and gentle chirps as they passed. Towering blocks of glass swayed in the heat haze, holding countless, faceless stories behind their blurry windows; all of them were completely indifferent to the chaotic scene below. From this vantage point, we could see behind the Broadway curtain; the rot buried under glam and glitter pushing its way to the surface. The street below still pined for our eyes, performing a garish travesty of Americana to anyone who’d listen (and tap their Apple Pay). All the while, the grandeur of life proliferated in its masses for as far as the eyes could see. Even with all its cacophony, Broadway was no more than a small needle-stick in the great palm of the city.
It was a sobering sight. As we looked down, ugliness just became more apparent. Everyone on that street is fighting for your attention. That’s the currency on Broadway. There is an arms race to be the loudest, brightest, and most brash. The whole façade thinly veils the city’s destitution. You’re encouraged to be distracted, to take no notice, but from up high, that thin veil slips from the shoulder and all is seen. The darker side of the city’s rapid expansion has been the continued increase in the homeless population and, from above, it was more visible than ever. While crowds of deep-pocketed and cowboy-clad thrill-seekers gallivanted up and down the street, many impoverished Nashvillians also strolled aimlessly, looking for their daily opportunity to make ends meet. It was a grim contrast. Some were coming to Broadway to live, while many were coming just to survive.
Continuing our search to find the real soul of Nashville, we left Broadway and found ourselves drawn to food. There was really no question about it. We simply had to try the eponymous hot chicken. If honky-tonk guitar is the face of the city, hot chicken must be its heart. Now famous across the States and even making its way across the pond, there was no doubt in our minds that this chicken had to be excellent. So, we joined the crowds piling into Hattie B’s, and soon enough we had two trays of The Good Stuff served with enough carb-loaded sides to kill a horse.
What makes Nashville hot chicken unique among its many competitors in the fried chicken game is the coating. Once fried, a glaze is made by blooming cayenne pepper, various other spices, salt, and sugar in the hot frying oil. This oily glaze is generously painted over the chicken crust to impart intense heat and iconic color without compromising the crisp texture. The chicken is then served immediately on a slice of cheap white bread with a lone gherkin slice to garnish. From the first bite, the chicken demands your attention. It’s spicy with a sense of bravado. It’s obnoxious and loud and looking for something to prove. But underneath, it’s frankly nothing revolutionary. The flavors are uncomplex and rely mostly on rich fattiness and lots and lots of salt. I honestly struggled to find the words to describe it—not because it left me astonished into speechlessness, but because there was actually not much to comment on. It was Broadway incarnate.
I see the appeal of hot chicken. If you’re someone looking for a novelty, someone slightly masochistic, if you feel you need to prove something to yourself or someone else, or if you just want a quick thrill, hot chicken is a great fast-food option. It’s certainly more exciting than the seemingly endless supply of practically identical chicken joints out there. It is not, however, the legendary food of the South we were promised. But, like Nashville, it seizes your attention completely. In many ways, it is the perfect food for the city. So, I was left thinking that maybe the explosion in hot chicken joints has had little to do with flavor, culture, or history. Rather, in the attention economy, the world has become a more Nashvillian place.
