If there’s one thing that’s more synonymous with Nashville than music, it’s hot chicken.
Today, hot chicken pops up on menus across the city with all sorts of variations, but the dish has a long history in the Black community of Nashville. It also exemplifies a much greater issue in Southern foodways with white chefs taking credit for and profiting off of Black ingenuity.
Many believe the dish was created by the Prince family decades ago when local casanova Thorton Prince got in trouble with his partner for coming home too late. As a punishment, she supposedly added a bunch of hot pepper to his fried chicken — but it ended up being delicious.
Because of segregation in the city, both officially (until the mid-1960s) and unofficially since, hot chicken was a favorite in Nashville’s Black community for many decades but was widely unrecognized outside of it.
This has changed in the past decade or so, and André Prince Jeffries, queen of hot chicken and current owner of the original Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, has encouraged competition from other restaurants — but has suggested visitors remember the creators of the dish.
And I definitely think it’s worth making the trip to Prince’s to get the original hot chicken.
This story was originally published on November 15, 2024, and most recently updated on June 5, 2026.
Read the full article here
