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Photo by Theresa Stanley
Photo by Theresa Stanley
Tony Palombino is like a lot of restaurateurs who study others’ concepts to see what’s trending. If a dish or drink piques his interest, he’ll experiment with it as a special or add it to a menu at one of his places. And if it sells really well, it becomes his next concept.
That’s what happened after he tested a version of Nashville hot chicken at his Manny & Merle restaurant in Louisville last spring. Food sales at the taco-centered honky-tonk nearly doubled, signaling that Palombino was onto something.
“Tacos are still holding strong there, but 30 percent of the menu mix now is hot chicken,” said Palombino, also the founder of the seven-unit Boombozz Pizza & Taphouse chain. “We knew we had a good one, so we really rushed to turn it into a concept.”
That idea took the form of Joella’s Hot Chicken, which opened in Louisville last August to long lines and sales that exceeded the expectations of Palombino and operating partner Bruce Rosenblatt. Each week’s revenues surpassed the prior week’s, leaving Rosenblatt scrambling to keep up with customers and sending Palombino on the hunt for a second location. A site in Louisville was chosen, but when he learned the longtime Billy’s Bar-B-Q site in Lexington at 101 Cochran Road was available, he dashed east to get it.
“I didn’t intend to scale it outside of Louisville this quickly, but the opportunity to do it in Lexington was there, so we jumped on it,” Palombino said. “I’ve wanted to be in the Lexington market for a long time because it’s really growing.”
The time between Billy’s move-out and Joella’s opening was just under eight weeks, a hectic turnaround that surprised even Rosenblatt, a management veteran of such large chains as Cracker Barrel and Chuy’s.
“Tony was onsite every day working as the general contractor making sure everything was on schedule,” Rosenblatt said. “You never really know in the restaurant business what’s going to happen when you’re trying to open. It’s always something. But this might be the fastest I’ve ever seen.”
A primer on Nashville hot chicken
If revenge is a dish best served cold, someone forgot to tell the girlfriend of Nashville’s Thornton Prince. As legend has it, Prince liked the ladies, but at least one woman in his coterie didn’t like sharing. So after a long night out on the town without her, Prince’s girlfriend decided she’d teach him a lesson by making his favorite dish, fried chicken — spiced as heavily as she could with a coating of ground, hot peppers.
As the story goes, Prince tasted it and gasped, but not out of horror. He loved it and shared some with his brothers, who not only loved it as well, but turned the dish into their own restaurant, the BBQ Chicken Shack sometime in the 1930s. Today it lives on as Prince’s Chicken Shack.
In the eight decades since, hot chicken has become a Nashville staple that’s been reinterpreted around the city at places like Hattie B’s and Bolton’s, but the dish remains largely the same: chicken that’s brined or soaked in buttermilk, coated in fl our and fried crispy in a pan or a pressure fryer, and then rubbed in a paste of oil (or lard) and a blend of cayenne and black peppers, paprika, garlic powder and brown sugar. The chicken is then served on white bread and garnished with pickle slices.
Nashville chicken’s spice range varies from tame to torturous based on the amount of cayenne in the paste. At Joella’s, the heat ranges from Ella’s Fave (some warmth) to Tweener (keep a drink handy) to Fire-in-da-Hole (eyewatering, tongue-numbing burn) with a few settings in between.
Ella’s Fave is most popular with customers, Palombino said, though he’s seen an equal number of women and men reach for the fi re. “I’ve seen plenty of ladies take on the heat while their husband is saying, ‘I can’t touch that,’” he said.
Palombino notes that Nashville hot chicken is but one part of a much larger spicy foods trend in the U.S. Once contented with mere Tabasco, a surging number of Americans crave foods emboldened with African piri-piri peppers, Thai bird chiles, habanero peppers and even the arguably vicious ghost pepper, which pegs the Scoville scale at better than 1 million units. The better-known jalapeno, by comparison, comes in at around 8,000 Scoville units.
“Heat’s popular, but it’s something I can’t explain,” Palombino said. “I don’t like it too hot. Personally, I like Ella’s Fave. It’s the perfect balance of flavor and heat.”
He’s confident, however, is the mashup of heat and chicken is ideal, and he’s eager to ride a flavor wave he said started with Buffalo wings.
“The words ‘hot’ and ‘chicken’ are sexy and cool when you put them together,” he said. “People are drawn to that.”
Include in that the people at KFC, which launched its own Nashville Hot Chicken in January. Unlike more traditional styles, KFC pours a spicy sauce onto its Original Recipe and Tenders products, leaves off the bread, but does garnish with pickles. When asked if KFC’s Nashville entry concerned him, Palombino said no, insisting its mass marketing has raised awareness for all Nashville hot chicken.
“About that time [of KFC’s launch], we kept having record weeks back-to-back, and my partner kept wondering what was going on, why we weren’t slowing down some,” Palombino said. “What was going on was KFC announced its rollout; O’Charley’s, too. So they’re validating the product and marketing hot chicken for us.”
Joella’s chicken prices range from $8.50 for a Quarter Dark (leg and thigh) to $12 for a Half Bird. All chicken plates come with a choice of two sides from a list of eight.
“Our chicken tenders are the top sellers by far,” said Rosenblatt, adding that each store goes through about 2,000 pounds of tenders weekly. “But what’s surprised me most about the Lexington store is how many wings we sell. It’s huge. Maybe that’s because it’s a college town.”
Boylan Sodas, lemonade and teas round out the soft drink menu and drive the check average to $12.50. For those who want a craft beer to cool the burn, the Lexington store is getting a customer-operated dispenser that works with a pre-paid card. Once inserted, customers can choose to dispense as little as 1 ounce in order to try a beer or just fill their glass.
“The nice thing about that is they can drink at their leisure without having to get back in line to buy one beer at a time,” Palombino said.
The 2,900-square-foot Lexington store seats about 150, a size Rosenblatt said isn’t appreciably larger than the original location in Louisville. What’s discernibly different, he said, is the slightly larger kitchen and pace of business.
“We had a stronger opening in Lexington than we did in Louisville,” Rosenblatt said. “We’re definitely in awe of the volume, but as long as we can keep every position staffed, we can execute well.”