The restaurant itself has only one small booth which patient patrons rotate in and out of, plus a row of folding chairs under the front window, like in a laundromat. The window between kitchen and front counter is high up the wall and small, like in the maximum-security wing of a prison. (Should be a new menu item: “Maximum security wings.”) Try peeking through the swinging gate doors, and they’ll snap closed in your face; if you’re quick, you might catch a glimpse of the large wheel on the pressure cooker (looking like the domed hatch you see them wheeling closed in submarine movies), but that’s about it.
What to say about second-generation Nashville musician Lorrie Morgan’s joint? That is, once you’ve stated the obvious: that HOT CHICKENS DOT COM (7541 Ole Hickory Blvd., Whites Creek), is a beyond-stupid name for a restaurant. And to be accurate, this is Lorrie Morgan AND Sammy Kershaw’s place, though the requisite family history is from her side: daddy George Morgan (he of “Room Full Of Roses” fame) was a frequent patron of Bo’s Chicken Shack and its offspring, Prince’s & Columbo’s. He purportedly had the Columbo’s recipe deciphered by a chemist friend, as this enabled him to be fry-daddy at home. Daughter Lorrie is said to use dad’s recipe.
It would be tempting to draw parallels between the high-gloss finish of her music and the surface-only flavor of her bird; a lot of the outer layer of spices tends to fall ineffectually off the chicken. Folks who should know say that her birds are deep-fried, then covered with sauces of varying degrees of hotness. To some, this disqualifies her outright. That notwithstanding, the chicken here is OK; it beats Bolton’s or Joe’s fairly handily, but the flavors are nowhere near as complex as Prince’s or Mr. Boo’s.
Located just beyond Nashville city limits in White’s Creek, here it’s actually the circuses — not the bread — that are most off-putting: ferns and shiny chrome by country kitsch decor in a bland brick rancher, and a giant-screen video playing (what else?) Lorrie Morgan videos. A glass-encased take-out counter is fully stocked with stacks of purchasable CDs and signed 8×10 glossies, logo-emblazoned caps and t-shirts.
Hubby Sammy gets menu props for the potato salad; if you like yours eggy and creamy, you’ll dig this. Fair warning, though: Kershaw is the genius would-be entrepreneur who once intended to market a cologne made from the pheromones that oozed from his own personal sweat glands. If you want to manufacture your own sweat, go for the fried chicken liver sandwich: it’s awesome. After a longish drive home and about half an hour sitting on the kitchen counter in its wax-paper wrapping, both bread and paper were completely soaked through with grease, glowing with a diffuse special-effects light, like the ambrosia in that one episode of “Xena”. Hot and dense and peppery — organ meat sandwiches don’t get any better than this.
And so, finally, we arrive at Prince’s. You knew it. We knew it. Everybody knows it: PRINCE’S HOT CHICKEN SHACK (123 Ewing Dr., Nashville) is the best hot chicken in Nashville, thus the world. (You didn’t really think we were going to contradict Yo La Tengo, did you? What, you mean you didn’t know about the Yo La Tengo penchant for hot chicken? Don’t you kids read liner notes?)
Prince’s, tucked into a decrepit strip mall next to a security-gated hair salon, is on the north end of town; it defines old-school funky. Paneled entryway walls are covered with taped announcements, events, apartments for rent, etc. Several high-backed, whitewashed wooden booths line the worn linoleum floor. Everything else is painted hospital green. The ordering window is ringed with wrinkled and grease-coated signed photos and record covers, and a more-than-fair-share of award plaques and clippings from local newspapers.
A portable television sits on a folding chair, behind a low dividing wall, likely as not tuned to wrestling and turned up loud. Across from the television and just outside the kitchen door hangs the pay phone where a flour-dusted employee will answer the perpetual ring with a curt, “The Shack…”
The ordering window is low on the wall; you lean in to order, and the person at the register leans down to hear you. All this leaning business makes it somewhat difficult to be casual in trying to catch telltale glimpses of the action back in the kitchen; then again, the folks at Prince’s are way too cool to care. Look on ahead, baby. Toward the back, we’ve seen big chicken quarters (and Prince’s birds tend to be notoriously B-I-G) being compelled to dance (at the behest of rubber glove-clad workers), to pirouette and flop about, in prodigious mounds of dry seasoning.
These treated quarters are then crammed into the biggest iron skillet we have ever seen — probably two feet across. As they simmer, soaking up heat and flavor, the chef scoops a softball-sized hunk of white lard and drops it gently in amongst the nestled, browning birds. Watching that hunk slowly soften, lose its contours and liquefy, is the soothingest kind of meditation — you just know that everything is going to work out fine.
Fine, that is, unless you get it in your head that you have something to prove, and that somehow what you need to do is to order your Prince’s anything other than “mild, please.” Don’t mess around, unless you really know what you’re doing; and especially don’t have anything like a multiple-hour car trip on the way to a job interview planned for the next morning — because you won’t make it. Try it, and your car seat (not to mention all your clothes) will be soaked through with cayenne-laced perspiration. If you’re lucky, just perspiration.
Pass the napkins and bust a gut, y’all.
