The proprietors of Prince’s, and its many imitators, regularly appear on TV food-and-travel shows. Six years ago, the James Beard Foundation gave the restaurant its America’s Classics award, which honors “timeless” establishments serving “quality food that reflects the character of its community.” Nashville hot chicken, the foundation said, was a “totemic” creation. In November, Eater named Prince’s one of the thirty-eight essential places to dine in America.
#SLOW BURN CHICKEN DRIVER#
After the fire, tweeted, “Literally any other hot chicken place coulda burned down but it had to be prince’s.” Addressing the driver of the Ford Explorer, declared, “All of Nashville hates you sir.”
The invention, now known everywhere as Nashville hot chicken, sounds like a viral novelty, like the cronut, but it long predates Instagram: it became popular more than eighty years ago, in the city’s black community, and the recipe originated with one family, the Princes. In the past decade or so, the restaurant’s signature dish, hot chicken, has proliferated worldwide, and the original incarnation, fried chicken bathed in fiery spices, has been subjected to relentless permutation-tacos, ramen, sushi, oysters, apple fritters, empanadas, pâté, poutine. When Nashville residents learned that Prince’s would be closed indefinitely, a minor panic ensued. Yellow police tape outside Prince’s front door stretched toward the shattered glass of the targeted bodega. As a precaution, the fire department shut off the strip mall’s gas and electricity. Ducts and wiring lay exposed, and there was extensive damage from smoke and water. Firefighters went inside and started yanking down ceiling tiles and singed insulation. Lawless began calling colleagues-to them, and to generations of customers, Prince’s is a kind of second home. After hearing a boom, he got out of there, in case the flames reached the restaurant. Two doors down, just past Jennifer Nails, Tyreese Lawless had come to work early, as usual, to clean the fryers at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. The authorities arrived to find the Ford abandoned and the shop on fire. The store was empty-it was four-thirty in the morning. The vehicle, which had been reported stolen, was propelled by a brick weighting the accelerator. Police later called the incident an attempted burglary. Three days after Christmas, in a part of northeast Nashville that many locals describe as “dicey,” a Ford Explorer crashed through the front of a discount-tobacco shop at one end of a strip mall.
0 kommentar(er)
