The Best Hot Chicken in Nashville

Who serves the best gorditas in Mexico City? Or Baltimore's can't-miss crab cakes? Welcome to Taste of the Town, where we call on a local expert to share the best versions of one of their city’s most iconic foods. Here, we take a walk on the scorching side with Nashville's most electrifying hot chicken.Hot chicken is enshrined in Nashville’s culinary canon, having been honed in the city’s Black neighborhoods for nearly 80 years. But it didn’t hit prime time until 2007, when the inaugural Music City Hot Chicken Festival set off a series of events that ultimately catapulted the dish into the national spotlight. In the intervening years hot chicken appeared at restaurants spanning LA to NYC, even earning a controversial spot on KFC’s menu in 2016. But the truest way to experience the dish remains a visit to Nashville.Hot chicken is fried chicken coated with a thin-but-deadly cayenne pepper paste bolstered with lard or vegetable oil, with noted variations laced with paprika, garlic, and black pepper. Usually served in quarter parts, the fiery pieces arrive atop white bread and are anointed with pickles. (Exact recipes are fiercely guarded, so good luck finding an ingredient list.) The Nashville mainstay is a spicy foil to the city’s milder tradition, the meat-and-three, which frequently centers fried chicken that doesn’t deliver a punishing heat known to linger in the esophagus for days.Spice levels are chosen by diners, which begin on the shallow end with “Southern” (no heat) and “mild.” On the far other side of the spice continuum, every restaurant has its own choice words for a hallucination-inducing level of hot, like “Shut the Cluck Up” at Hattie B’s or “XXX Hot” at Prince’s. Most include a warning of no refunds and a stern caution to know the limits of one’s own taste buds—something too many poor souls choose to ignore.Prince’s Hot ChickenMultiple locationsThere’s no hot chicken without Prince’s, plain and simple. According to Nashville lore, the dish was first concocted by a scorned lover of original owner James Thornton Prince III. Instead of wailing in agony after sampling the vengefully spiked bird, Prince fell in love with it and founded the BBQ Chicken Shack in 1945. Prince’s has changed locations and names over the years (great-niece André Prince Jeffries dropped the “BBQ” after taking over in 1980), although the recipe has remained unchanged (and undisclosed). Beyond its South Nashville digs, Prince’s now has outposts downtown and in the Nashville airport. All remain family-run and deliver spice levels bordering on face-melting.Bolton’s Famous Hot Chicken & Fish624 Main StreetIf Prince’s wrote the book on hot chicken, Bolton’s wrote the sequel. Opened by Bolton Matthews and his wife, Dollye Graham-Matthews, in 1997, Bolton’s serves a recipe developed by Matthews’s uncle Bolton Polk, who worked at Prince’s for years. An intense dry rub coats the chicken both pre- and post-frying, imparting a crunchy crust with slow-building heat. Bolton’s squat white cinder block building with bright red trim in East Nashville has a basic menu of bone-in chicken and tenders, but don’t sleep on the hot fish—catfish or whiting—which features the same crackling exterior and cayenne-forward flavor. A note for performative heat chasers: “Mild” is quite spicy, so think twice before you order.400 Degrees3704 Clarksville PikeIn her childhood, owner Aqui Simpson Hines’s once-a-week Prince’s Hot Chicken habit bordered on obsession. By adulthood, she’d developed her own allspice-and-cumin-­enhanced hot chicken recipe to rival it, leaving corporate America behind to open 400 Degrees in 2006. The restaurant’s unfussy dining room is spiced with colorful murals, among them an ominous bathroom­-door piece featuring a toilet spewing orange flames. Heat levels range from the benign 0° to a habanero-­informed 400°, with more torturous off-menu options like 500° (dosed with ghost pepper), 800° (Scorpion pepper), and 900° (Carolina Reaper, a nightshade stronger than some pepper sprays).Red’s Hot Chicken115 27th Avenue NorthChef Eric “Red” White spent 15 years perfecting a recipe that turned heads when he began selling it from a food truck in 2017. He graduated three years later to a screened-in shack attached to the Springwater Supper Club & Lounge, one of Nashville’s most structurally dubious dive bars. White’s chicken begins life in a 36-hour buttermilk brine; the resultantly juicy meat then gets a crackly coating brushed with cayenne-and-smoked-paprika­-infused oil. Go for the hangover-appropriate wrap, which swaddles hot chicken tenders, pickles, bacon, pimento mac and cheese, and rémoulade-like “comeback sauce” in a crispy tortilla. Retire to the tiny patio with a crisp beer from the Springwater to douse any internal flames.Brave Idiot922 Main StreetThere are 10 levels of spice to choose from at Brave Idiot, and if you’re ordering anything above an eight, you’re living up to this East Nashville food truck’s name. Permanently parked outside pinball-centric dive bar No Quarter, Brave Idiot is the unhinged brainchild of chef Dylan Field. The petite menu is split between smash burgers and chicken. Don’t miss the Hot Chicken Sandwich, featuring a crispy and comically large fried thigh on a bun from local Charpier’s Bakery slathered with tangy pimento cheese and a house-made sweet pepper relish. Flash a photo of your cat for a 10 percent discount.Hattie B’sMultiple locationsEverybody eats at Hattie B’s, perhaps simply because there are so many of them. The local chain, founded by father-son duo Nick Bishop Sr. and Nick Bishop Jr. in 2012, was born after the Bishops introduced hot chicken to their meat-and-three restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee. Its success birthed a stand-alone hot chicken restaurant in Nashville’s Midtown, which in turn launched a multi-state expansion that’s now reached as far as Chicago, Dallas, and Las Vegas. Locals still flock to Hattie B’s for its reliable service, plus a sprawling menu that includes salads, grilled tenders, and sides like pimento mac and cheese and bacon-cheddar grits. The hot chicken here is a touch on the sweet side thanks to a cayenne-forward spice blend that includes brown sugar.Helen’s Hot ChickenMultiple locationsJeremy Mallard and LaSonya Morrow started operating Helen’s, named for Mallard’s grandmother, in 2008 out of a no-frills trailer on Rosa Parks Boulevard. Within six years, they’d opened their first brick-and-mortar, eventually landing on historic Jefferson Street in North Nashville, followed by an outpost at the edge of Vanderbilt’s campus. Standouts include the whole leg quarter, fried to order and served on white bread with pickles. Real ones order fried okra and gizzards too. Don’t be thrown by the demure appearance of the chicken’s crispy blond-colored coating—“Hot” is plenty spicy, and “Hella” might just blow your lid. For those with nothing left to lose, there’s also “Helen’s Revenge”: The meet-your-maker dish, slathered in a paste of Carolina Reapers and ghost peppers, is free of charge if you devour it in five minutes or less.Pepperfire5104 Centennial BoulevardIsaac Beard spent nearly a decade studying Nashville’s varied hot chickens and developing his own formula before opening Pepperfire in 2010. That monomaniacal groundwork shows in his heavy-handed, rust-colored spice dustings, which offer dimension rather than brute fire. Six heat levels range from the no-heat “Chicken” to “No Refunds,” the latter for those with strong stomachs and weak self-preservation instincts. The Tender Royale is a must-order: brined tenders, fried and hit (if you so choose) with Carolina Reaper oil, served on a deep-fried grilled pepper jack cheese sandwich.