Foodies Clan

Why Polari, Britain’s lost gay language, employs so many food words for subversive concepts

Typically, if I said that I’d recently eaten an especially memorable dish, I’d probably mean I’d tried something new at a restaurant. But in Britain 60 years ago, to the mostly (but not entirely) gay male speakers of a dialect called Polari, this phrase had a different, codified, deliciously lurid meaning: Dishes have rims, if you know what I mean.

Polari has a complex hybrid genealogy, as it developed out of terms used in what was known as “Cant” as far back as the 16th century among thieves, evolving into fairground and theater jargon in the 19th century when it was known by its speakers as Palyaree, which then evolved into what we now call Polari. (As a stealth, informal practice, spellings for both the lexicon itself and its vocabulary somewhat varied; the term “Polari” was only codified with that spelling after 1950, following the lexicographer Eric Partridge.) The thread binding these forms is use by outcast or sidelined groups, and Polari as both a jargon and an ethos draws on the languages of the groups that populated these spaces: Romani, Jews, Italians, and the working class.

Although Polari is often called a secret language, it was never a language in the strictest sense. Rather, it is a set of slang-y vocabulary replacing descriptive words in English. An example often given is some variation on, “How bona to vada your dolly old eke,” which strictly translates to “how good to see your pretty old face” — “nice to see you,” more or less. The banal elements of English, the prepositions and pronouns, are retained, and the sentence structure is the same; an English-speaker with a Polari vocab sheet could understand it. The origin of some of these words is obscure, but explicable: “Eke,” meaning face, comes from “ecaf,” or “face” spelled backward. “Bona” is a declension of “good” in Latin, and thus related to the words for “good” in just about every Romance language. Other Polari terms are derived from languages that proliferated around working-class London as Polari was evolving into its more recent form in the early-to-mid 20th century.

Some words in Polari are even less literal, however. They take on a metaphorical or metonymic cast, a trait that is especially clear in how Polari deals with eating, food, and drink.

There are two kinds of food words in Polari. One group comprises words that pertain to eating and drinking. Some of these are not that complex; a drink is a “bevvy,” for example, a pretty obvious shortening of the word “beverage.” (The term “buvare” was also used; this too derives from Romance languages.) The other group utilizes food terminology euphemistically for words that inherently have nothing to do with food; many of these are concerned with sex (and some of them are so enduring they’ve crossed over into the general lexicon, queer or not). The term “meat curtains,” or “beef curtains,” for one. (It means female genitalia, and is just one of several instances of Polari being, let’s say, somewhat misogynistic.) But also fruit, meaning a gay man; chicken (a young gay man); seafood (a sailor); fish (a woman, not kindly); tart (for a prostitute); and the aforementioned “dish” (for several things, butts chief among them).

Two questions come to the fore about all these Polari food words: Obscuring talk about gay sex in a society that was hostile to it makes a lot of sense, but why was it necessary to have special terms for food and drink, which are universal and mundane? And why did so much of the necessary vocabulary for subversive concepts go back to food?

Understanding the meaning of food to Polari necessitates understanding its history and context. Because it was not formally a language, and because it existed to sidestep social and legal strictures, Polari in its prime — starting in the 1930s but especially the postwar period, up until about the 1970s — survived ephemerally, in the memories of its speakers and in the handful of documents, texts, and recordings where it appeared. That there is a coherent narrative about Polari available for anyone to access and a dictionary that now allows it to be used is largely to the credit of Paul Baker, a professor in the department of linguistics and English language at Lancaster University, whose doctoral thesis on Polari resulted in two academic volumes on it published in 2002, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men and Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang.

In 2019, Baker returned to the topic of Polari in Fabulosa! The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language. One thing Fabulosa establishes well is that Polari, while needed since “gross indecency” was illegal in Britain, was also very fun. Terms that didn’t necessarily have to be encoded, like those for food and drink, naturally built on how people were already engaging in wordplay in the social environments they inhabited: bars, restaurants, pubs, and cabarets. Around these spaces, people weren’t just talking about food; they were talking about other people, especially in terms of sex, and food words began to stand in for some of the specifics. In Fabulosa, Baker records lyrics from various drag acts, several of which pull in food terms masking sex acts. The drag queen Lee Sutton, for example, performed a parody of “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” included on the 1971 album Drag for Camp Followers:

Five and twenty chickens well and truly done.
On the kitchen table they were most obscene.
Now wasn’t that a bona nosh for some old greedy queen.

The entire joke is the double meaning: Someone who knows Polari will understand this is about gay sex, while theoretically the entire thing will scan as if it’s about food. From 2022, with a broader awareness of drag culture, it may seem unlikely this coding was effective at concealing very much. It’s a recording of a performance, however, and so tailored to an audience opting into the joke already. Also, if somebody really wants to ignore the sexual meaning, there is plausible deniability built in, especially if just hearing the recording without the other elements of the performance.

The entire overlay of eating onto sex is possible because both are forms of consumption, broadly, either of food or bodies — sometimes, in the case of the latter, pretty near literally: The word for eating, jarry, also meant to fellate.

Polari fell out of use around the 1970s, for a few reasons. One was that a popular 1960s BBC Radio show called Round the Horne had included two implied gay characters, Julian and Sandy, whose dialogue regularly incorporated Polari terms, thus mainstreaming it a little, and dulling its utility. Another is that in 1967, homosexuality was partially legalized by Parliament, which at least theoretically permitted gay sex between consenting adults of 21 and up, making it less crucial to talk about it in code. As the 1970s saw the blossoming of the LGBTQ rights movement, the predominant style and affect of gay men began to shift from presumptions of feyness and camp to a grittier, more explicitly masc presentation; Polari, with its roundabout coyness, was an inelegant fit. In a political sense, Polari also didn’t work with the shift from a culture of secrecy to one of visibility. Starting in the 1980s, of course, many of the men who had used Polari succumbed to AIDS; by 2022, many of them would be elderly, or no longer alive, due to the basic passage of time.

But Polari isn’t forgotten, thanks largely to the efforts of Baker — and some of the most notable recent uses of Polari have occurred around food and dining. West London’s Portobello Brewing, for example, makes Polari, a pale ale whose sales partially benefit Stonewall Housing, an organization that assists LGBTQ people with finding homes. More interestingly, the London restaurant Hoi Polloi, now closed, opened in the Ace Hotel (also closed) in gentrified Shoreditch in 2013, along with a cocktail menu where the drinks were named after Polari terms. The Bijou Basket, for example, was a gin-based cocktail with ginger and rhubarb elements; its name was Polari for “small package,” meaning the male genitalia. Others included the Meshigener Palone, Bona Hoofer, and Naff Clobber — “crazy girl,” “good dancer,” and “ugly clothing,” respectively.

David Waddington, half of the duo that owns the East London restaurant Bistrotheque, which developed Hoi Polloi for the Ace, says that Polari is part of a “tradition of camp” in British culture, and that he was first exposed to Polari in widely viewed media like the Carry On comedy film franchise, which between 1958 and 1992 saw 30-plus entries; the sitcom Are You Being Served?, which ran in 10 series from 1972 to 1985 before producing a 1990s spinoff and a 2016 revival episode; and Willo the Wisp, a 1981 cartoon series narrated by Kenneth Williams, who was involved in Carry On. (Williams also provided the voice of Sandy on Round the Horne.) Waddington later encountered Polari in Soho in the early 1990s, where he “met a lot of people that had used it more kind of firsthand, that were a generation or so older than me.”

“Hoi polloi,” although not a Polari term, encapsulates a similar camp wordplay, Waddington says. A Greek word that directly translates to “the many,” it’s often used snarkily to mean something like the rabble, or “the great unwashed,” as Waddington puts it. “The name played on this kind of slightly underground-speak of saying this is for everybody, this is a brasserie for everybody, come in. But coded and slightly a filter. You have to not be offended by it and understand the playfulness of it to get it.”

Giving the drinks at Hoi Polloi Polari names extended this spirit of playful double-meaning. As in Sutton’s lyrics, there was a surface-level inherent meaning and rhythm to the cocktail menu — the alliterative double spondees of “Bijou Basket” — and a secondary meaning for those in the know.

“What was interesting is that some people got it straightaway, like on Twitter and things,” says Waddington, “and they would be laughing along. And other people just thought, ‘Well, that’s a daft name for a cocktail, but it’s fun. Let’s go for it.’ ... You didn’t have to know that ‘bona basket’ meant a lovely cock. It was just about a basket. You know, ‘I’ll have three bona baskets, please.’”

Waddington says he and business partner Pablo Flack arrived at using Polari on the Hoi Polloi drinks menu after listening to Julian and Sandy bits from Round the Horne. Despite the pedigree, and Waddington and Flack’s venues often incorporating queer elements, such as drag and cabaret performances at Bistrotheque, Waddington says it was not an intentional signaling to LGBTQ customers. “We are a queer-owned business,” he says. “We’re very open about that. We don’t hide any of those things, of course, but at the same time, we’re not trying to teach people anything, or to make a protest, or to make a stand — we’re just here, and we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Polari’s afterlife has also expanded beyond the U.K. The Brooklyn-based queer food journal Jarry, which published six issues between 2015 and 2018, employed the term for eating (food or otherwise) as its title, said to derive from the Italian “mangiare,” to eat. Co-founder and former editorial director Lukas Volger, author of the recent cookbook Snacks for Dinner, says Jarry was originally set to be called Goodie, “as in, gay foodie,” which didn’t pan out. “So we spent a lot of time at the chalkboard playing around with things that we learned about Polari,” says Volger. “How it is such a part of a cultural scene ... among theater workers ... sort of like an artsy thing. I love how food intersected with that. And so we started just looking at what the words in Polari were, and the word ‘jarry’ for food seemed like such a great idea ... we could so picture it immediately.”

The name, however, was a deep cut. According to Volger, “we always had to explain” what Jarry was a reference to, although it was “actually a really fun thing to sort of introduce people to.” Volger says that he and co-founder Steve Viksjo did not initially know how Jarry was pronounced; they thought it was jar-ee, but it’s actually pronounced like the name Geri. They found out when they were corrected by Simon Doonan, the former Barneys creative ambassador from Reading, Berkshire, who was a primary Polari speaker before moving to New York in the late 1970s.

Although Jarry approached the intersection of food and community from a different place than Waddington and Hoi Polloi — from its first issue, Jarry was concerned with the politics of queerness in the restaurant industry — Volger also noticed a discrepancy between those who got the reference in the title, and those who didn’t: “I spoke at conferences that were not queer spaces. And the existence of this sort of secret language is so titillating to an outsider. Among gay men and among queer circles, it just makes you feel more connected to this broader history. And so it was kind of interesting introducing it to those two inside and outside types of audiences.”

If Polari appeals to both insider and outsider audiences, it’s probably because, although there are words for many other things, its core concern and raison d’etre is sex. In an email, Baker said that “sex is often referred to through food or eating metaphors anyway, not just in gay slang,” giving the examples of “terms like cheesecake and crumpet” — a U.S. term for scantily clad pin-up girl posters, and a British one for hot women you’d like to get with, respectively. Crumpets are round, yeasted buns that are often compared to English muffins, but they’re slightly different, often squishier and with more pronounced, distinctive holes. They are virtually always served with butter, which melts into and then oozes back out of the nooks. Trader Joe’s sells them, and perhaps the best way to get the crudeness of the metaphor is to go buy some, toast them, smother them in butter, and then take a squeeze.

Cheesecake and crumpet are mostly het terms. (Although they don’t have to be; they just tend to be used that way.) But, as Baker said, as Polari became more obscure, new metaphors replaced it: In Polari, he said, “A young gay man was referred to as a chicken, although this usage died out in the early 1990s and has since been replaced by an Americanism, twink — which is also a food metaphor.”

But even with Baker’s work and reclamations like Hoi Polloi and Jarry spurring contemporary interest in Polari, aside from the loan words it’s given to English (“naff” — which is common British slang for something lame and vulgar — meant a straight guy in Polari, as Waddington points out, derived from “not available for fucking”; in his book Gay Men Don’t Get Fat, Doonan calls it the most important word in Polari, and “quite possibly in the history of mankind”), it is largely a historiographical interest. In Fabulosa, Baker writes that, “As a ‘dead language,’ Polari is to gay men what Latin is to Catholics.”

To the extent that Latin was used by the Church to elevate itself beyond the common, this is a useful comparison. In Queer City, a 2017 survey of London’s LGBTQ history, Peter Ackroyd writes that Polari “afforded a sense of community and belonging among those who spoke it, and sealed them off from the various impositions of the common language.” This was especially important to LGBTQ Brits at the time when Polari was more commonly used — but Ackroyd’s description could be extended broadly to most slang, which is often incubated in subcultures before expanding outward to the general population, if it winds up there at all. If there are words for food in Polari, and food terms replace so much sexual vocab, it’s likely because socializing — the context out of which slang grows — happens around food and drink. Bars especially have played a central role in queer history, and drinking and eating are less segmented in British culture, owing to the nature of the pub.

Yet there is also something cool about subcultural arcana, and an inherent irony in returning to a system born of oppression in places where it’s now possible (if not always comfortable or easy) to talk about more kinds of sex more openly. Although Polari has not been a secret, exactly, to use it now is to signal belonging: We are in on this, and we get it. If you know what we mean, you have good taste, and aren’t naff. Polari is not a food world trend by any means — but some bar or restaurant, eventually, will use it again. And when they do, you’ll know what they’re trying to say.

Sarah Tanat-Jones is a U.K.-based illustrator who is inspired by printmaking techniques and colors from a jewelry box. She loves drawing with ink and playing the drums.

Theme parks have long used fried chicken to evoke a sense of old-timey, wholesome Americana. But who, exactly, is this nostalgia really for?

As you stroll across the colorful plaza just off of Disneyland Park’s Main Street U.S.A., the oil-drenched scent of crispy fried chicken hits the nose instantly. Wafting out of the pink three-tiered Victorian mansion known as the Plaza Inn, the fried chicken dinner at Disneyland is one of the 66-year-old park’s most sought-after offerings. It is also, arguably, its most iconic because it was a favorite of Disneyland founder Walt Disney. Most importantly, though, it’s a dining essential for the millions of people who visit the “Happiest Place on Earth” each year.

A few miles away, one of America’s first theme parks — Knott’s Berry Farm — got its start as a bustling fried chicken restaurant. Opened in 1920 in Buena Park, California, the park was originally a berry farm. At the entrance sat Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant, which, starting in 1934, served steaming plates of fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits, and, of course, boysenberry pies. By 1940, the restaurant inside what was once the Knott family home had become a phenomenon, selling up to 4,000 chicken dinners each Sunday. Eighty-some years later, the fully fledged theme park welcomes over 5 million visitors from all over the world each year, according to Knott’s, and sells upward of 1,000 chicken dinners daily.

“It is just nonstop fried chicken,” says Carlye Wisel, a theme park expert and journalist who’s written extensively about Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland. “And as my husband describes it, it’s ‘just fine’ fried chicken. It’s kind of like pizza in the sense that even if it’s not great, it’s still pretty good — because it’s fried chicken.”

More than a century after the founding of Knott’s Berry Farm and almost 70 years after the opening of Disneyland, fried chicken remains a staple at theme parks nationwide. “Chicken is one of those foods that travels well. It’s easy to produce. If you’re at a theme park and you’re hungry, a drumstick or a wing is quick and easy to eat,” says Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, chair of American Studies at the University of Maryland and the author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power. “It’s also flavorful and filling and feels like a comfort food.” Most of the country’s largest amusement destinations now boast some sort of fried chicken on their menus, from the basic boneless nuggets at parks like Six Flags to the beloved fried chicken platters at Disneyland’s Plaza Inn.

Disney/Bob Desmond

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Disneyland — and historic amusement parks like it — aren’t just peddling family fun and fried foods. They’re also manufacturing a highly romanticized version of America’s past through stories of American exceptionalism, often centered around the decades just before and after the turn of the 20th century. After hitting Victorian-era Main Street U.S.A., Disneyland parkgoers can stroll through Frontierland, with attractions glorifying the “Pioneering fun” of the mostly European western migration in the 1800s. At Tennessee’s Dollywood, you can start with a ride on an antique steam engine train (a proud symbol of manifest destiny) and end inside a replica of an old country chapel (a nod to folksy moral purity). Just outside Branson, Missouri, Silver Dollar City features working blacksmiths, candle dippers, a covered wagon ride, and a paddleboat dinner cruise all dedicated to the American “spirit of adventure.” Across America, amusement parks draw millions of visitors each year with a mix of family-friendly fun, “simpler times” nostalgia, and an opportunity to revel in a “shared” national identity. But these versions of history have been heavily edited and sanitized, reflecting a very narrow experience of an even narrower swath of people and begging the question: Whom, exactly, is this nostalgia really for?

The same can be asked of the parks’ favorite food, too. No dish more accurately evokes the complicated history of Americana, or classic American culture, than a plate of battered and fried yardbird — but that nostalgia is rooted in a time when “Americana” really meant “white America.” “Fried chicken is a dish that gets to be beloved by white folk as a piece of Americana, when really it’s way deeper than that,” says chef and writer Amethyst Ganaway. “This is my opinion, but for old white people, fried chicken brings nostalgia in the same way that old white people love to visit Charleston, [South Carolina].… A lot of those nostalgic feelings don’t come from their grandmas making them fried chicken because their grandmas probably learned to make it from a Black person. It’s rooted in their racism.”

Fried chicken was popularized in America by former African slaves. Its exact origins remain unclear, though the technique has possible roots in Senegalese chicken yassa, or stewing fried pieces of meat in a flavorful sauce. At the beginning of the 20th century, fried chicken was viewed as a “lesser” food and used as a way to malign Black people in this country, due in large part to a scene in the horrifically racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation that depicts actors portraying rowdy Black elected officials, one of them eating fried chicken “ostentatiously.”

Following a period of World War II red meat rationing, in which chicken became a popular protein in the United States by necessity, fried chicken underwent a cultural revamp, moving outside the realm of Black Southern cuisine and into the popular consciousness as a cheap, hearty meal. By the 1950s, “there were a lot of transitions happening. It was the Electrolux and Tupperware era, with all kinds of material goods being mass-produced and disseminated for the first time,” says Williams-Forson. “It was also right after the end of World War II, when African-Americans served as cooks during the war, often preparing fried chicken.” As soldiers returned home from the war and food rationing restrictions ended, fried chicken saw a rise in prominence across the country. Colonel Harland Sanders would franchise out his recipe for “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for the first time in 1952.

It just so happened that at the same time, the country was entering a second golden age of the amusement park. Postwar America was in the midst of a new era of economic prosperity — including for Black Americans — and some people now had the financial means to take vacations with their families. Theme park proprietors embraced the lure of Americana in an effort to draw big, mostly white crowds.

And as the American economy boomed, so did the bountiful family-style spreads of fried chicken on theme park tables across the country. Three years after Disneyland opened, Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty opened in 1958 near the picturesque Wisconsin Dells, a tiny vacation destination known as the Waterpark Capital of the World that attracts more than 4 million tourists each year. The establishment, inspired by a mythically strong lumberjack, served all-you-can-eat fried chicken dinners to patrons for more than 60 years. (Recent pandemic-related staffing shortages have forced the restaurant to close for lunch and dinner, and take fried chicken off the menu, much to the disappointment of Dells regulars.) Silver Dollar City launched in 1960, and its Southern Gospel Picnic at the House of Chicken and Fixin’s features a buffet — the ultimate signal of abundance, another national value — of “Miss Molly’s famous fried chicken” and sides.

America’s love of excess was matched by its soft spot for the past. In 1986, country singer Dolly Parton partnered with an old Tennessee theme park and rebranded it Dollywood, where she still serves up heaping plates of her mother’s famous recipe for fried chicken. Available inside Aunt Granny’s Restaurant, the Southern-style chicken here is seasoned with paprika and cayenne pepper, fried to a crisp, then served family-style with sides like mashed potatoes, green beans, and cornbread. When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, chicken was on the menu at the 1890s-themed restaurant the Red Wagon Inn, the park’s first sit-down dinner establishment. Now called the Plaza Inn, the restaurant still serves three chicken pieces pressure-fried to a golden-brown crisp alongside mashed potatoes, veggies, and a fluffy buttermilk biscuit — for a cool $18.99. “People who visit Disneyland starting when they’re a young child grow up and bring their children there, and maybe even their children’s children,” says Wisel. “People feel tied to it. It’s a generational thing, and I think a lot of its fandom is rooted in the people who went there as a child and fell in love with the park — and its fried chicken.”

Dollywood

Dollywood

By the mid-1960s, fried chicken was being used to sell everything from Mrs. Tucker’s shortening in the Saturday Evening Post to Banquet frozen dinners offering a taste of this down-home favorite without all the flour and frying. By 1974 Kentucky Fried Chicken, the country’s first major fried chicken chain, was already taking its product international, expanding to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Jamaica. “When big brands saw how Kentucky Fried Chicken was able to mass-produce a meal that was recognizable and a comfort food for so many people, it was a no-brainer to add those items to their menus,” says Ganaway.

Today, Southern-style fried chicken continues to be a staple for almost any business trying to tap into a sense of quaint, old-fashioned family fun. But the truth is, for many nonwhite consumers, “old-fashioned” does not equate to fun — not even close. A bitter reality underlies the charming trappings of this manufactured Americana, even if theme parks have done their best to sweep the horror of our history under the rug. It’s especially bizarre considering that, now for multiple generations, Americans of all backgrounds have made their own happy fried chicken memories at places like Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland. That’s the nostalgia they’re trying to tap back into and happily pay more than $100 a ticket for — plus $18.99 for fried chicken.

Michael Hoeweler is a New Jersey-based lifestyle illustrator who loves to make drawings about people, culture, fashion, nature, food, and more.
Fact checked by Kelsey Lannin
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein

For decades, the corner halal fried chicken shop has been a staple of New York neighborhoods, and an important economic foothold for their Afghan owners

It’s around 5 p.m. on a Thursday inside Crown Fried Chicken on Broadway in Newburgh, New York, and a young woman talks into her cellphone: “Be there soon! I have $6 on my card, and I’m hungry.” She laughs. “I had to stop at Crown’s.”

As she waits for her four pieces of fried chicken and a biscuit, a teenage boy hustles through the door, places his order, and sits on the edge of a bench seat, tapping his foot and singing under his breath. Colorful laminated posters of halal menu items cover the wall behind him: fried chicken, fried fish, burgers, beef patties, sweet potato pies, banana pudding, ice cream, kebab, gyro, and lamb over rice. A few minutes later, he jumps up, pays for his big box of chicken, and then jogs across the street to join his group of friends who are hanging out in front of a corner bodega; they happily share the chicken standing up. The next kid in line orders and pays for an ice cream. As he hurries toward the door, the cashier shouts from behind Plexiglas, “You’re short a dollar!” The boy freezes. “Nevermind, you pay later,” the cashier says. The boy darts off.

The Newburgh branch of Crown Fried Chicken looks and feels and tastes the same as a host of fried chicken shops operating under names like Royal Fried Chicken, New York Fried Chicken, and most commonly Kennedy Fried Chicken (sometimes spelled “Kennedy’s”) in neighborhoods across northeastern cities like Philadelphia, Albany, Hartford, and New York. Along a particularly dense stretch of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, you can see from one Kennedy to the next over several blocks.

This style of chicken shop is an archetype: the same laminated posters are on the walls advertising halal fried chicken — bone-in, battered-and-fried chicken made with halal meat — as well as halal soul food, Middle Eastern classics, and fast-food staples like burgers and fries; the fried chicken is roughly a dollar per piece, and a cashier serves from behind a Plexiglas window.

There is no official category for these businesses, though they’ve sometimes been called hood chicken spots — affectionately by regulars, derisively by outsiders — and for those who grew up with them, they are beloved, as much a part of the fabric of a neighborhood as the barbershop or corner store. No matter the name on the sign, the halal chicken shop is the first place you visit when you return from a trip, after school or work, and especially after leaving the bar, when, on some nights, the lobby pops like an after-party with music blaring through the open doorway from the street. “Kennedy is a staple!” says Bronx-based psychologist Shenea Brown of her local shop. “Those sweet potato pies…” She throws her head back and laughs. “The chicken is great, and everybody can afford it.”

Clay Williams

Clay Williams

Brown’s beloved Kennedy might share a name, menu, and business model with dozens of others across the region, but it is not a franchise — it’s one in a loosely unaffiliated network of halal-based fried chicken restaurants that, for more than 50 years, have provided good accessible food and job opportunities for new arrivals to America, particularly those from Afghanistan. Fahim Hotaki got his start working at a Kennedy in Harlem as a teenager after leaving his hometown near Kabul with his family in the mid-’90s. “By 18, I owned a 20 percent share of the business,” he says, and eventually went on to launch his own halal chicken operation with a small group of partners, Texas Chicken & Burgers.

“The most hospitable people on Earth are the Afghan people. We will give you a place to stay, food, or a restaurant name,” says Hotaki. “Anybody can open a Kennedy.” For as long as halal fried chicken shops have been around, that informal fraternity has helped countless entrepreneurs get started in the business without much quibbling over proprietary matters. Within the halal fried chicken network, each generation of owners shepherds the next, often letting them borrow their restaurant name when they are ready to open their own. It’s not uncommon to see laminated menu posters labeled Crown Fried Chicken or New York Fried Chicken inside a Kennedy or vice versa, and veteran owners are quick to share sourcing and pricing information.

Recently, however, some are wondering whether that generosity might be holding the businesses back. “Kennedy and places like that could be making more than KFC and Popeyes,” says Hotaki. “We’ve been in New York longer than Popeyes.” Now, after more than 20 years in the halal chicken shop business, Hotaki and his partners are trying to take halal fried chicken mainstream and shed the “hood chicken” reputation. Together the group owns 43 Texas Chicken and Burgers locations, and while the menu is still halal, they don’t look like the other shops. There are no prepaid calling cards hanging behind the register; there are no paper plates taped to the window with handwritten specials like “Fish Sandwich 2.99”; there are no laminated photos on the walls. Instead, you’ll find a much smaller digital menu backlit above the cash register, soda fountains have replaced the cooler behind the counter, and there are stiff new vinyl booths. Texas Chicken and Burgers looks like a franchise in a national fast-food chain, and while they haven’t officially franchised yet, that’s exactly what the partners are going for.

Clay Williams

They aren’t the first to try to corporatize the halal chicken shop. In 2011, a Kennedy owner named Abdul Haye, who’d obtained the rights to the restaurant name and, according to the New York Times, warned legal action against using the name without his permission, which threatened to “unravel the fragile harmony in the fried chicken fraternity.” Ultimately, it wasn’t Haye’s legacy to undo. He, Hotaki, and most halal chicken shop owners are following a blueprint written two generations ago by a man named Taeb Zia — nicknamed Zia Chicken or Zia Morgh (in Dari) — an Afghan American who arrived in New York from Kabul in 1972 and learned the business while working at a place called Kansas Fried Chicken, owned by Black and Puerto Rican developer Horace Bullard. Zia opened Kennedy Fried Chicken in 1975; he used Bullard’s business model, but he sourced all halal ingredients and lowered prices. By the 1980s, Zia had six locations in New York, and many of his former employees had gone on to open their own as well, with his blessing. Almost all were managed and staffed by Afghan immigrants who had fled the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

That was the case for Hotaki and his family, who immigrated during the years of fighting between the mujahideen and the Soviet-backed communist Afghan government. His father left around 1989, and the rest of his family joined him in 1995. “I saw bombs dropping from planes in the sky,” says Hotaki. “We could predict where they would land based on the sound.” Hotaki’s father was a doctor and had to take a job driving a taxi when he arrived in New York. “It was sort of an embarrassment for us,” he says. “I was not like the average teenager over here. You want to go outside and play basketball, to have fun clubbing. Instead I was just focused on lifting up my family from the situation that we were in.” Hotaki started working at a Kennedy Fried Chicken on the corner of 145th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem, sometimes 14 hours a day. He rose quickly with hard work and the support of the tight network of compatriots.

Success stories like Hotaki’s aren’t uncommon in the halal chicken world — and is part of why the shops have continued to be such an attractive option for new immigrants. The profitable business formula is another. The restaurants typically operate in high-traffic areas, are open long hours (some as late as 4 a.m.), and the most popular items have always been legs and thighs, which are inexpensive on the front end, even when sourcing more expensive halal meat — a nonnegotiable. “They have to slaughter one animal at a time by hand with a knife, slowly, then recite a prayer and face Mecca,” says Ahmed Mohammed, an employee at a Kennedy Fried Chicken shop on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. He holds up an app on his phone with a compass that points to Mecca. By expanding their halal offerings beyond Middle Eastern dishes to include classic fried chicken, they can serve a wider customer base; many cuisines can be halal as long as the ingredients are produced and processed according to Islamic law.

Clay Williams

Clay Williams

Hotaki’s motivation to deviate from the formula is based on the same sentiment he has always held: “I just want to pull my family up.” But he also acknowledges that some things are lost when you become a chain — and not just the quirky decor. Independent shops are able to adjust to the customer base of their neighborhood — a halal fried chicken shop in a densely Caribbean neighborhood might also carry tostones or coco bread; another, fried shrimp. Sisters Carmen and Maria Hernandez come to the Jerome Avenue Kennedy Fried Chicken specifically for its 12-piece fried shrimp basket. “You eat this today, and tomorrow you go back on your keto,” says Carmen. Additionally, many independent shops choose to offer free food to homeless people, let someone who is short a dollar pay later, and generally be sensitive to the needs of the low-income neighborhoods where the restaurants tend to be based.

But a large chain with centralized management needs homogeny and written rules. At a Texas Chicken & Burgers in Brooklyn, there is a sign directly facing the entryway that reads “No Begging, No Hanging Around, No Alcohol, 15 Minute Seating Limit.” “But if we make more money, we can help much more,” says Hotaki. According to the website for Texas Chicken & Burgers, the business contributes to church events, Thanksgiving food drives, iftar meals, a New York City-based Afghan soccer team, and other nonprofit efforts. In January, a building fire in the Bronx killed 17, including eight children, injured more than 60, and left many more homeless. Many of them were Muslims from Gambia. Hotaki and his partners mobilized, serving lunch and dinner to roughly 350 affected families free of charge.

Hotaki is confident that Texas Chicken & Burgers will continue expanding. More importantly, he believes it is the future for halal fried chicken and that the old network isn’t what it once was for Afghan Americans. “I see the new wave coming, and they are not getting into the fried chicken business,” says Hotaki, referring to the influx of refugees arriving from Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover last summer. His sentiment was echoed by a number of other chicken shop owners from the older generation, and they might be right. Compared with the 1980s, there are far more governmental and nonprofit support systems in place today, from groups like The Tent Partnership for Refugees and Upwardly Global, to help with the employment and resettlement of Afghan refugees. That leaves less of a need for the local community’s more informal recruitment efforts — and less new arrivals to man the chicken fryers.

Still, there are plenty more new American Muslims from places like Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, Yemen, and Gambia who are eager to follow Taeb Zia’s model. Ahmed Mohammed immigrated to the Bronx from Yemen in 2017 and recently started working part-time at the Jerome Avenue Kennedy. The shop’s owner — a fellow Yemini and friend of Mohammed — bought the business from an Afghan American, who sold it to invest in Texas Chicken &cont Burgers. “I have a job at Montefiore Hospital and a master’s degree in technology,” says Mohammed, “but business is in my blood. I’m here to learn from my friend and maybe open my own.” Mohammed’s coworker is a young Gambian named Muhammed Duku Reh, who says he knows several other Gambians working in halal fried chicken shops, but only two owners. “I think in the next generation, lots of us will be owners,” he says.

Mike Diago

As I spoke with Mohammed, a woman came into Kennedy, sat at a bench without ordering, put her bags down, and began shouting loudly. But no one seemed bothered; the Hernandez sisters were busy enjoying their shrimp basket, and everyone else stood patiently in line. Soon, the woman picked up her bags and left. “We don’t chase anyone off here,” says Mohammed. “Especially when it’s cold, you have to treat people well and things will be fine.” Back in Newburgh, the Pakistani manager of Crown Fried Chicken, Waris Khan, hangs a sticker with a star on it next to the front door — part of a local grassroots initiative called the Star Project, where customers can pay extra and the cashier will set the money aside to cover someone who needs a free meal. The note is a welcome sign to neighbors in need. “We are Muslim,” says Khan, as he bags a customer’s chicken. “God says if you give one, you’ll receive 10 in return.”

Mike Diago is a writer, social worker, and cook based in the Hudson Valley.
Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based food photographer and the co-founder of Black Food Folks.
Fact checked by Kelsey Lannin
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein

Restaurants like New York’s Rowdy Rooster are showing how Indian fried chicken is not just a riff on the Southern American staple

Chintan Pandya and Roni Mazumdar, the pair behind restaurant group powerhouse Unapologetic Foods, want you to know that their new fried chicken restaurant, Rowdy Rooster, is not the “McDonald’s version” of Indian food. The fast-casual counter space on Manhattan’s 1st Avenue — once occupied by a late-night roast beef sandwich joint but abandoned years ago — might feel like fast food, with its buns and buckets, its fried potatoes, and its hyper-colored mural of a rooster. But suggestions that this is an American concept dusted with garam masala miss the mark.

“There’s always been a context of a fried chicken in India,” says chef Pandya. There’s halal fried chicken, sometimes cooked whole, at stands in Delhi. There’s chicken pakora in Mumbai and Kolkata. There’s red chicken fry in Hyderabad. Fried chicken is part of the region’s culinary fabric. There’s sesame seed-sprinkled Dhaka fried chicken in Bangladesh. There is chicken 65, chili chicken, and chicken lollipop, the latter two mainstays of Indo-Chinese cuisine.

But in America, fried chicken has long been associated with American Southern cuisine and soul food, and because of that, most people assume any “new” takes on it are starting from an American baseline. “Guests often assume that my fried chicken comes from my exposure to the cuisine of the American South,” writes chef Asha Gomez, who was born in the south Indian state of Kerala, in her cookbook My Two Souths. Her fried chicken, marinated in buttermilk and herbs, dredged in flour, fried and finished with a drizzle of coconut oil and fried curry leaves, certainly resembles American-style fried chicken. “It’s always fun explaining to them that it is actually part of my Keralan heritage.”

Clay Williams

Much has been made of fried chicken’s “moment” in America, as Nashville hot chicken has become nationally beloved, Popeyes’ chicken sandwich causes unheralded fervor, Jollibee expands, and the twin blades of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation have everyone reaching for “comfort foods.” Yet even as Korean fried chicken and Japanese karaage have gained notoriety and popularity among wider audiences in the past few years, chefs and the food media often present South Asian fried chicken as putting an “Indian twist” on something fundamentally American.

It would be easy enough for chefs to throw some cumin and coriander into the batter, call it Indian, and cash in. But South Asian chefs in America are instead using the fried chicken wave, and the growing interest in regionality when it comes to international cuisines, to highlight how fried chicken has been part of their cultures all along — and prove that it’s time for America to stop being the center of the fried chicken universe.

It’s slightly ridiculous to believe any country or culture would have a monopoly on fried chicken. American fried chicken has its roots in Scottish and West African cuisines, but basically it’s a universal cooking technique applied to the most popular meat in the U.S. Restaurateurs like Pandya and Mazumdar must figure out how to keep fried chicken in an Indian context while presenting it in a way that is legible to people who might still carry the misconception that it’s not an Indian thing or that everyone in India is a vegetarian.

The main issue, they realized, is that most fried chicken in India isn’t really a main course. It’s either served in the home or it’s a street food snack. Chicken pakoras served at a train station outside of Kolkata may have been a staple of Mazumdar’s childhood, but it’s hard to build a restaurant concept out of that. “The most important part was, How do you then take the fried chicken and transform that into a lunch, dinner, that kind of a meal, and add those sides?” he says.

Instead of throwing chaat masala on french fries or making a “butter chicken mac and cheese” to evoke classic American pairings, Mazumdar and Pandya ensured that all their sides and accoutrements were actually Indian. The chicken sandwich is served on a pao bun, which you can order alongside your chicken pakora at many street vendor stands in India. Rather than offering fries, they prepare potato or eggplant pakora, and in place of corn on the cob, a masala corn salad. Even the way the chicken is butchered eschews American bias. “If you look at the bone-in chicken that’s in Popeyes or KFC, you have a drumstick and you have a leg,” explains Pandya. “But in India, we don’t eat it like that. Our chickens are cut into smaller pieces.” Sure, it would have been easier to serve a bucket of drumsticks — it would have saved time and money and be recognizable to non-Indian customers as a bucket of fried chicken. “But then you are not doing justice to the cuisine and the culture.”

Clay Williams

Clay Williams

The popularity of South Asian fried chicken has been simmering for a few years, though mostly in a way that highlighted the fusion between American and South Asian cuisines. Butter chicken-esque fried chicken sandwiches or spiced chicken wings have become staples at restaurants like Badmaash in Los Angeles, Gupshup in New York, and Farmers Branch, Texas’s SpicyZest. Before opening Rowdy Rooster, the team at Unapologetic Foods even served a masala fried chicken sandwich at the now-shuttered Rahi, which featured a flavored mayo, fried onions, and, indeed, masala fries. Call it fusion or call it first-generation cuisine; it’s a natural, delicious pairing.

Those preparations enforced the idea that fried chicken was first and foremost American, but perhaps they also created more room for the traditional. Gomez’s fried chicken was fawned over after her cookbook was published in 2016, written about with slight shock that it wasn’t American at all. New York restaurant Badshah, which opened in 2017, and the Twin Cities’ Raag, opened in 2019, have pakoras and Kerala fried chicken on the menu. And in 2020, when Chicago’s Keralan pop-up Thattu was named one of the year’s Best New Restaurants by Food & Wine, writer Khushbu Shah specifically mentioned the fried chicken as one of its highlights.

Margaret Pak and her husband, Vinod Kalathil, opened Thattu in the Politan Row food hall in Chicago in 2019. The stall focused on the food of Kalathil’s native Kerala, which Pak first tasted while visiting Kalathil’s family. “I was literally flipping out 17 years ago,” Pak told Eater about first trying Kalathil’s mother’s fried chicken. “It barely has a touch of rice flour, if that, but it’s just mostly spices and aromatics like ginger, garlic, curry leaves.”

Thattu’s offerings skew traditional, with dishes like appam, fish moilee, beef fry, and pachadi. The fried chicken, says Pak, adheres closely to what Kalathil’s mother makes. But because of the logistics of running a food stall, they decided it would be more practical to serve the chicken boneless, with a yogurt sauce in case some people found it too hot. Despite those changes,the chicken is the real deal. “A year ago, we went back to Kerala. I was very nervous, but I actually made it for my mother-in-law,” says Pak. She got a resounding thumbs-up.

“I think that everyone knows deep down that everywhere has a tradition based on fried chicken,” says Sam Fore, the chef behind Tuk Tuk Sri Lankan Bites, a Sri Lankan pop-up in central Kentucky. In Sri Lanka, she says, that often takes the form of devilled chicken, a snack consisting of marinated chicken tempered and fried with aromatics like mustard seeds, hot pepper, and curry powder. Fore, who was born in Kentucky and raised in North Carolina, takes these flavors as an inspiration for her Sri Lankan fried chicken, which she calls a marriage of Sri Lankan curries and American fried chicken. Hers uses traditional Sri Lankan spices like dried curry leaf and ginger, and is brined in buttermilk.

Melissa Blackmon

Melissa Blackmon

American fried chicken is also part of Fore’s, and many South Asian families’, fried chicken tradition. She says KFC is a “big deal” both in Sri Lanka and with the American South Asian diaspora. Fried chicken chains are incredibly popular in Asia, where the combined factors of the prevalence of dietary restrictions that eschew beef and pork, its affordability, and KFC’s growth in the ’60s and ’70s — right when the U.S. lifted laws that limited South Asian immigration — made it a staple in many American South Asian homes. “It got woven into our childhood,” says Fore. So her Sri Lankan fried chicken is as much an homage to that as anything else.

For all the fried chicken traditions across South Asian communities, some chefs find that putting an “Indian twist” on fried chicken is what lets them build followings for traditional flavors. Fore, for one, developed a fried chicken spice powder for Spicewalla, so anyone can make her fried chicken at home. And at other modern Indian restaurants, chefs have found that fried chicken is an easy way to meet diners where they are.

Bar Goa in Chicago focuses on the food of Goa, a small state on India’s southwest coast, the cuisine of which is heavily influenced by 400 years of Portuguese colonization. At first, chef Sahil Sethi was focused on serving more traditional preparations of Goan food, like chicken cafreal, a dish that supposedly originated in Portuguese colonies in Mozambique, which is traditionally marinated in spices and vinegar, pan-fried, and served with sauce. However, he found that people weren’t familiar with the vocabulary. Initially, he and Bar Goa owner Rina Mallick changed the name to “Goan Chicken Curry” at Bar Goa’s Time Out Market location. But then Sethi thought to combine it with a bar favorite, the fried chicken sandwich.

Bar Goa’s fried chicken cafreal sandwich is served with cabbage slaw and a cafreal aioli, and by keeping the name “cafreal,” diners now have a word to associate with the flavors. It also offers pork vindaloo sliders and chicken xacuti wings, other combinations of traditional Goan flavors in a more American context. “What [Sethi is] trying to do with our menus at Bar Goa is really open up the exposure to different types of flavors,” says Mallick.

Sophina Uong, chef and owner of Mister Mao in New Orleans, also takes liberties with her Kashmiri fried chicken. Fried chicken, she says, is the “workhorse” of the menu. No matter what, people will order it. But she wanted to make sure it was a dish true to her experiences. “I was messing around with bhajis, or pakoras,” she says, dishes she and her husband loved to eat while living in Northern California. She recognized that dishes like pakoras were similar to Nashville hot chicken, in that they were often dipped in a flavorful oil or sauce after frying. So she decided to use South Asian flavors like Kashmiri chili, fenugreek, and cumin.

Uong, who is of Cambodian descent, doesn’t adhere to one cuisine on her menu. Instead she’s interested in playing with all the flavors she grew up with, whether it’s the Mexican and Indian food she ate in California or the flavors of the American South. So while her Kashmiri fried chicken isn’t a play on a traditional dish, she hopes diners understand that she understands what she’s doing. “We made it pretty clear on our menu that we are inauthentic, but we cook from our hearts,” she says.

Every chef I spoke to was dancing around a frustrating reality. For some, it’s about showing Americans what exists in South Asia without any caveats. For others, it’s about presenting those flavors in ways familiar to people who are still intimidated by the cuisine or about combining flavors into something new. But they’re all still facing an uphill battle. South Asians have been in America since the 1700s and cooking versions of their food in restaurants for over 100 years, and yet chefs still have to speak in terms of “introducing flavors.” Underneath these missions are bigger asks, both “please understand and respect my culture” and “please don’t insist I am nothing more than my country of origin.” They still have to define the cuisine while also asserting their right to change and play.

Josh Brasted

Josh Brasted

Josh Brasted

The South Asian fried chicken boom perhaps represents an attempt to break free of that conversation altogether. The dichotomy is not between authenticity and innovation, but between food that’s made honestly, with both a sense of history and one of modernity, and food that’s made as a gimmick. “Why should Indian cuisine continue to be monolithic?” asks Mazumdar. Authenticity, honesty, and innovation don’t have to be separate ideas but rather tools any chef can use simultaneously.

Pak is thinking about making a fried chicken sandwich when Thattu finally opens a brick-and-mortar location. Uong wants to make a fried chicken “meat and three,” with sides like okra pakoras and green bean thoran. And Mazumdar and Pandya are hoping to test some other Indian fried chicken preparations to showcase what’s out there, whether it’s a whole Delhi fry or a chicken 65. It’s still fried chicken, after all. It’s supposed to be fun. But that drive to cook from a place of knowledge and respect, Mazumdar hopes, is what draws in those people who still need to be introduced to these flavors and keeps them coming back. “If something is real and meaningful to you,” he says, “only then can it be real and meaningful to others.”

Melissa Blackmon is a Chicago-based freelance photographer specializing in food/beverage photography and photojournalism.
Josh Brasted is a New Orleans-based freelance photographer specializing in dining, drinks, festivals and all things fun.
Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based food photographer and the co-founder of Black Food Folks.
Fact checked by Kelsey Lannin
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein

What’s in a shape? A lot, it turns out, when you’re five and hungry

The chicken nugget is a paradox: Its name implies a vague lump-like shape, but it almost always takes on a much more specific form, be it a dinosaur or a letter or a cartoon character. And while any adult nugget fan knows in their heart which shape is superior (it’s the dinosaur), kids live by a different set of rules.

For adults, it often comes down to a matter of surface area — and more specifically, the number and shape of the corners and crevices — for optimal dipping, in ketchup, barbecue, or even honey. Take a star-shaped nugget, for example: Want to get creative and dip each point into a different sauce? Go for it! And sure, whimsy is important, too. Whether it’s a dinosaur or an animal shape, one is never too old for the eternal debate of which to eat first: the head or tail. Got a busy adult life? Maybe you prefer to stick with a simple nugget like a McDonald’s boot or even a plain old oval-ish lump to dip quickly once and move on with your day.

But it’s the preferences of true chicken nugget connoisseurs that drive the most impassioned and, quite frankly, wildest debate, and the real experts are the youngest among us: little kids. An adult can nerd out about the best ratio of meat to breading, but why does a kindergartner stubbornly refuse one shape and worship another? It’s a riddle. “I don’t like the round ones,” said Silas, 5, of Ankeny, Iowa. “They’re ucky.” (Silas prefers dinosaurs. Obviously.)

The preservation of our species may not depend on understanding the chicken nugget shape preferences of children, but digging into their nugget standards might reveal something important about ourselves or, perhaps, something more esoteric about the true nature of nugget quality. After all, as Quinn, 4, of Frederick, Maryland, mused, “Chicken nuggets are great because they are super good.”

Eater decided to explore the crucially important topic by means of a very scientific* survey of parents and kids from around the country, garnering more than 100 responses from families in 24 states. The survey offered eight choices of shapes — round, star, dinosaur, boot (such as at McDonald’s), cartoon character (such as SpongeBob or Minions), animal, fries, rings, and “other.” As it turns out, most kids were less concerned about shape and more interested in talking about the overall “yumminess” of nuggets or about what to dip them in (mostly ketchup) or simply why they’re so great. Or as 5-year-old Dash in Los Angeles said, “If someone said they didn’t believe me, I would just open their mouth and put one in, and then they would know.”

Of course, these mashups of questionable chicken parts coated in breadcrumbs are just a vehicle to remind us that in the end, kids are probably smarter than us and maybe we should pay more attention to their opinions. Here’s a thought: Add a kid to every advisory board. Eat some chicken nuggets together. Solve the world’s problems.

With that, here are the best chicken nugget shapes, ranked, according to children ages 3 through 7.

(*note: extremely unscientific)

Dinosaur

Dinosaur nuggets, unsurprisingly, are the favorite. They first hit supermarket shelves in the 1990s, likely invented by chicken giant Perdue and popularized by the release of Jurassic Park in 1993, so they’ve had about three decades to cement themselves as the prevailing nugget. Over half of the survey respondents answered “dinosaur,” for reasons ranging from surface area to breading-to-chicken ratio to fierceness. Many elaborated with details on the particular type of dino that is the preferable shape.

On dinos in general:

• “If they are round, you get less nugget, and the tail and legs give you more nugget.” — Dylan, 6, El Segundo, California
• “Because they are marching into my belly, and I eat their heads.” — Jaya, 3, Los Angeles

On T. rex:

• “T. rexes are big, and the bigger the nugget, the more ketchup you can put on it.” — Finnegan, 6, Annandale, Virginia
• “Because of the roar. Roar!” — Alexander, 5, Hudson, Massachusetts
• “It has a good ratio of crumb to meat.” — Charlie, 5, Framingham, Massachusetts
• “There is a T. rex inside of me.” — Dean, 4, Boston
• “Because that’s the only kind I get to put ketchup on, because T. rexes are meat eaters and the ketchup is like blood.” — Gus, 4 1/2, Somerville, Massachusetts
• “He’s kind of fierce, and I like fierce things.” — Jackson, 5, Phoenix
• “This dinosaur is really good at killing each one of them, and it’s my favorite dinosaur.” — Cory, 6, Audubon, New Jersey
• And, terrifyingly, “Because it’s like eating a face.” — Apollo, 5, Ocean, New Jersey

On the other dinos:

• “[Pterodactyl] because it looks like the Batman symbol.” — Wyatt, 6, San Diego
• “[Brontosaurus] is the best because it’s so long. It’s longer than the other kind.” — Ian, 6, Falls Church, Virginia
• “Velociraptor because it can run faster than people.” — Graham, 4, Manhattan, New York
• “[Indominus rex (Jurassic Park’s fictional cross between a T. rex and a velociraptor)] because I love it. The other shapes are more crunchier. I play games with them — the fight arena game. They kick out other opponents so they will be eaten. There is always a winner, and he gets the grand prize of ‘LAST TO BE EATEN!!!!’ ” — Quinn, 4, Frederick, Maryland

Cartoon Character

Ah, branded pop culture tie-ins. It’s no surprise that kids get excited about nuggets shaped like their favorite characters, although only about 7 percent of respondents chose this option — enough to come in second place, but far behind dinosaurs.

• “Marshall from Paw Patrol because I’m a fireman and so is he.” — Finnlay, 3, Long Island, New York
• “Chicken nuggets will be the best if they are Minions dressed as dinosaurs.” — Tessa, 5, Washington, D.C.
• “Spider-Man because he has spidey eyes and he has a spidey web.” — Sam, 4, Wareham, Massachusetts

McDonald’s Boot

At first glance, one might think McDonald’s chicken nuggets come in an indistinct blob shape, but they actually come in four specific shapes. Eater included the boot on the survey since it’s the most easily recognizable of the four, and about 6 percent of respondents voted for it, with mostly straightforward reasoning: It’s a good shape for catching dipping sauce and for holding, and it’s less likely to come apart than other shapes, some respondents said.

• “It’s yummy.” — Said, 4, Medford, Massachusetts
• “Because God made our tummies round.” — Grace, 5, Stamford, Connecticut

Tie: Star and Round

Star-shape and round nuggets tied for fourth place, with about 5 percent of respondents each. Several children expressed that they just love stars, noting that they’re “pretty” or “beautiful.”

• Stars: “Because it’s out of this world.” — Cee, 4, Austin, Texas
• Round: “It’s easier to eat.” — Iselle, 6, Chantilly, Virginia
• Round: “A circle is round like the wheel and tire of a vehicle or a ball.” — Lewis, 3, Cary, North Carolina

Letters

The survey offered eight choices of shapes — round, star, dinosaur, boot (such as at McDonald’s), cartoon character (such as SpongeBob or Minions), animal, fries, and rings — but respondents could also choose “other.” Several respondents who went that route used the write-in option to praise letter-shaped chicken nuggets, particularly letters in their names. Molly, 3 1/2, of Los Angeles, and Mia, 6, of Oceanside, New York, for example, were both partial to M-shaped nuggets. Sadly, none chose to explain why. Still, we feel the fifth-ranking shape is worth mentioning — and might be worth incorporating into more elementary school literacy efforts.

Rings

And finally, just over 2 percent of respondents favored ring-shaped chicken nuggets, an under-the-radar pick that might please the adults who used to wear Bugles on their fingers.

• “Because you can put the chicken nugget on your finger.” — Avery, 6, Washington, D.C.
• “Because they get toasted all around, which makes the chicken soft AND crunchy. Where do chickens go when they get toasted?” — Anneliese, 4, Ossining, New York

Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein

Re-introducing one of life’s greatest joys: the fried chicken bucket

Last year, a few days before December 25, I decided I would grab buckets of KFC fried chicken for our Jewish family’s non-Christmas dinner. The idea isn’t unique: KFC “party barrels” on Christmas and the days leading up to it are a tradition in Japan, where the chain’s fried chicken has become the folkloric way to celebrate in a country not tied to Christian traditions. (In that spirit, I planned to make a trip to the closest Japanese market for plump ikura to pair with the secretly seasoned poultry pieces.)

The day of, it felt strangely good to pull up to a West Los Angeles KFC and wait in a short drive-thru line, anticipation heightening with every tire-inch forward. The cashier was nice, which made the experience even better, as did the instant satisfaction of tucking away a very large, very warm, very full plastic bag on the floor of my front seat. This sack of abundance held three whole buckets brimming with fried chicken (two extra-crispy, one original recipe), a smorgasbord of sides, and steam-creased boxes of those dense, almost cakey, buttermilk biscuits. It was a meal that could feed a family of 10 for less than $125. It was also familiar, a modicum of casual comfort as the omicron wave crested in Los Angeles.

Save the flat cardboard plane of a pizza box or the Chinese American oyster pail, perhaps no meal in America is as recognizable by its physical vessel as the fried chicken bucket. Consider the bucket’s design: the cylindrical shape, the waxy exterior, the white paper top with four small half-moon openings — there, ostensibly, to let air and moisture escape and keep the chicken as close to its post-fryer crispness as possible. The bucket’s chameleon skin can be altered with the branding of any bird-slinging business but always portrays one unequivocal message: Hot fried chicken in here.

For what’s essentially a molded strip of grease-resistant paper, the bucket is actually remarkable — a marvel, even, of modern engineering, its form intrinsically functional and elegant. The bucket is interchangeable for at-home, outdoor, or in-car eating. Measured by its capacity for chicken (10-piece, 12-piece, 16-piece, or more), most sizes can fit in the crook of an arm, balance on a lap, or be placed onto or below a front passenger seat. The bucket’s aesthetic appeal has made it a beacon of sorts: In Los Angeles’s Koreatown, a KFC building at the corner of Oakwood and Western is, itself, the shape of a bucket, a giant beige barrel that eclipses every other building on the street. Dinah’s Family Restaurant, also in Los Angeles, claims that the cement bucket sign shooting up from its roof predates the signs propped above most KFC locations. “We had the bucket of chicken out there [on the roof] since before KFC had it,” owner Teri Ernst told Eater LA in 2013. “Apparently, one of the former employees here back in the ’60s took the idea with him to KFC, and they started using it. But we had it first.”

In the cavernous fried chicken genre, KFC’s bucket looms large. It’s brought families to the table since its invention at a Kentucky Fried Chicken store in 1957, when not-so-nice-guy Colonel Sanders asked Salt Lake City franchisee Pete Harmon if he wanted to buy 500 paper buckets another store had purchased from a traveling salesman. The paper bucket, initially filled with 14 pieces of fried chicken, a handful of biscuits, and a pint of gravy, became a rapid success.

Other fast-food brands, like cult-favorite Filipino fried chicken chain Jollibee, have since adopted the chicken bucket. Jollibee’s buckets are squatter, their engine red exterior and beckoning bee face one of the simpler designs in the bucket kingdom. The first location of Popeyes in China, opened in 2020, supplemented the chain’s typical box-shaped carriers with orange-printed buckets (the Popeyes bucket is also available in the Philippines, but not in the U.S., where its nemesis, KFC, has mythologized the origin story). Harold’s Fried Chicken, a Chicago stalwart with 40 locations across six states (Chicagoans will assure you which are good and not good), has buckets for both its fried chicken and slabs of fried fish.

Unsurprisingly, fried chicken buckets permeate pop culture: Dinah’s bucket appears in the movie Little Miss Sunshine, a cameo that drove customers to the store for identical red-and-white buckets with the restaurant’s name printed in Googie-style lettering. Buckethead, the guitarist who played for Guns N’ Roses from 2000 to 2004, wears a KFC bucket on his head onstage, his hair flattened by the ghost grease of his bucket’s chicken past. Fried chicken bucket-shaped hot tubs and Polaroid cameras have manifested as KFC continues to market the paper pail as its hallmark contribution to the universe. “Vintage” unused KFC buckets sell on eBay for $125; a used bucket purportedly from the 1950s, its interior imprinted with drumstick-shaped oil stains, sells for closer to $200.

It’s perhaps this cultural resonance that contributed to the bucket’s pandemic proliferation. In the throes of the first and second waves of COVID-19 in 2020, fried chicken — the ultimate comfort food that inspires thousands of food writers to overuse the word “craggy” — became a business boon for chefs who needed to figure out something that would consistently sell during a crisis. Taku in Seattle served its bonito-dusted karaage out of sharply designed handheld buckets; a large offering, called the “Fuck It Bucket,” features three pounds of karaage in its depths. Oakland diner Hopscotch doubled down on its fan-favorite bucket loaded with eight pieces of buttermilk fried chicken to pair with soba biscuits and fried sunchoke. Han Oak, Portland’s Korean fried chicken temple turned hot pot restaurant, sold six-piece buckets of chicken: double-fried drumsticks and wings seasoned with the “essence of instant ramen” and nestled next to bread and butter daikon pickles.

And while they so often are, buckets don’t have to be beautiful. Addendum, Thomas Keller’s “casual” dining destination in Kellerized Yountville, serves fried chicken in nearly all-white buckets (when Addendum was in COVID hibernation, buckets of its fried chicken could be ordered from Ad Hoc). Los Angeles’s Lucky Bird and La Lucha in Houston serve fried chicken in similarly plain barrels. While the bucket itself can be a novelty, the more austere iterations show that it’s less about form than function. If the bucket’s ultimate purpose is to feed groups of people easily, it can look like exactly what it is: a sturdy paper drum.

Maybe most of all, buckets have come to signify family mealtime and community gathering. Family-size fast-food meals were a way to feed children and parents quickly and cheaply; the bucket’s meteoric rise seemed to speak to mothers resisting confinement in the kitchen. Over time, the bucket gave takeout dinners a familiar, totemic form and a way to make the meal communal (down to the rush of hands grabbing for the last piece of chicken). A friend told me that when she was growing up in Texas, a group of moms would take their kids to a park after church on Sundays, with a stop at a nearby KFC for buckets of fried chicken to picnic on. The feel-good memory of after-service buckets remains for her to this day, though she is no longer a member of any church.

I have the same feeling about the time KFC saved my family’s dinner in December. That night, people left the salmon and flying fish roe mostly untouched; what mattered most was in the bucket.

Naomi Otsu is a graphic designer and illustrator based in New York. Her work features a colorful array of elements inspired by the cities and cultures she grew up in.
Fact checked by Kelsey Lannin
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein

For Black women in America — especially in Virginia — fried chicken has always been a lifeline

Of all the foods the South has given to the American culinary landscape, fried chicken is one of the most impactful. And for good reason. In the more than 300 years since the dish was first recorded in the American South, it has garnered international praise for the characteristic combination of textures, techniques, and flavors that go into it: Crispy, crunchy skin hides juicy and tender meat inside, and if done properly, the seasonings can be tasted to the bone.

But where did one of America’s most popular foods begin? And, perhaps more importantly, what is the legacy of the enslaved and later free Black women who perfected this intrinsically Southern food? Signs point to Virginia, where there are still Black women who cook traditional Southern food and see the importance of having fried chicken on their menus.

When Virginia was still a colony, chicken was already a regular staple on wealthy dining tables. In 1634, when Captain Thomas Young visited Jamestown, he noted, “We found tables furnished with pork, kids [young goats], chickens, turkeys, young geese, caponetts and such other fowls as the seas of the year afforded.” By the 1700s, fried chicken was a beloved dish of Virginia governor William Byrd, who wrote about it in his diary, which is the earliest written account in America. Its popularity grew, and in 1828, fried chicken was firmly immortalized in the third edition of the first American cookbook, The Virginia Housewife. The recipe instructs the reader to cut the chicken “as for the fricassee [a thick white stew often made with chicken], dredge them well with flour, sprinkle them with salt” before frying with lard until the pieces are “a light brown.” In almost 200 years, the recipe remains nearly unchanged.

Enslaved Black women were considered to be experts in preparing everything now thought to be Southern food, including fried chicken. After the Civil War, they understood their freedom meant they could fully grasp some agency over their lives all while creating and sustaining economic freedom for themselves through their culinary talents.

“Food serves more than its intended function to nourish and to satiate. … But, the trading and selling of these foods for commerce also provided relative autonomy, social power, and economic freedom,” writes Psyche A. Williams-Forson in her book Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs.

Although Williams-Forson published her book in 2006, she still believes not much has changed since the dish was first brought to the American South. “Africans were frying food before coming to America,” she says. “When that mechanism came to the South, it was over-perfected by Black women. As evidenced by the work that I’ve done and found, it was part of a tradition associated with Black women. What I am more concerned with is what Black people did with this food that we had been mocked with. I’m more concerned with our resilience.”

Perhaps the most notable women who embodied this tenacity were the “waiter carriers” in Gordonsville, Virginia, who were the reason that the town was named the fried chicken capital of the world in 1869 by writer George W. Bagby. In March 1862, during the Civil War, the Army of Northern Virginia transformed the Exchange Hotel near the train stop into the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital, and during this time, the waiter carriers served thousands of soldiers who stopped through the town.

Gordonsville is about 20 miles outside of Charlottesville, and with the advent of the Louisa Railroad in 1840, it became a major stop on two train lines. When a train arrived in the station to drop off passengers or pick them up, they were met by the smells wafting through the open train windows of fried chicken and other baked goods that Black women carried in baskets on their heads. Because few jobs were readily available or accessible to Black women at the time, many used their culinary talents to provide for their families after the Civil War.

In 1871, C&0 Railroad sent northern newspaper editors to the South, and the scene was described like this: “We were surrounded with a swarm of old and young negroes … carrying large servers upon their heads, containing pies, cakes, chickens, boiled eggs, strawberries and cream, ripe cherries, oranges, tea and coffee, biscuit sandwiches, fried ham and eggs, and other edibles, which they offered for sale.”

Unfortunately, with the introduction of dining cars and air-conditioning that required permanently closed windows, along with license taxes that were imposed by 1879, the waiter carriers were slowly phased out. What remains in Gordonsville is a plaque honoring “the first black female entrepreneurs” in the town. The plaque reads: “With the introduction of rail service, enterprising African-American women commenced a tradition that was to symbolize Gordonsville forever as the ‘Fried Chicken Capital of the World.’ ”

“It wasn’t just in Gordonsville, it was all around the South,” Williams-Forson says. “You can look at the census, and there are many Black women who were noted as caterers.”

To this day, the city still holds an annual fried chicken festival, although the city’s focus has shifted away from celebrating the women the town once lauded. But, as Black people began to use their talents to become entrepreneurs by selling chicken, stereotypes sprang up that turned their empowerment into mockery and were used to justify racism and discrimination. This led to the creation of restaurants with names such as Coon Chicken Inn and Mammy’s Cupboard, which leaned into stereotypes about Black people all while selling food they made popular.

Fast-forward a few decades, and the legacy of Black women in Virginia who use their culinary talents to provide for their families and their communities still endures, regardless of external opinions or baggage. Michele Wilson is the chef at Ma Michele’s in Richmond, Virginia, and although she was born in Philadelphia, she has deep roots in Virginia.

“I did some research and found out my grandmother was born in Petersburg in 1901, and my grandfather was born in Lynchburg in 1903,” Wilson says. Wilson cooked with her family from an early age as she was growing up. Even now, she says she still uses her mother and grandmother’s recipe for fried chicken. “I knew something about what Black women had to do to sustain themselves [through cooking] and felt a kinship,” Wilson says.

When Wilson’s siblings moved to Virginia, she followed suit in 1989. While working as a mortgage specialist with Bank of America, she would make food for her office’s potlucks and soon began catering the office’s events. Shortly after, she worked for catering companies full-time before opening Ma Michele’s in 2015. Since then, Wilson has amassed plenty of experience preparing a variety of cuisines, but she chose to focus on Southern cuisine to showcase the dishes that reflect her identity and the work she watched family members put into their cooking, rather than concern herself with stereotypes or tired tropes mocking what it means to make the staple dish.

“I won’t separate from my culture,” she says. “Black chefs are rare and can tell the story now and can change the narrative.”

Like Wilson, Shane Roberts-Thomas, chef-owner of Southern Kitchen in Richmond, left her job in sales and marketing to open a restaurant. She learned how to cook from her grandmother, and Big Mama’s Fried Chicken is the restaurant’s best seller.

“I’ve been cooking all my life,” Roberts-Thomas says. “In the Black community, cooking is a way of life. Most women my age were cooking from a young age … there were no Chick-Fil-A’s.” The born-and-raised Virginia chef says she feels a connection to the Black women cooks who came before her and believes those women created a foundation for her to be able to run a successful restaurant.

“I have a fine dining restaurant making money off of collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken, fried fish, and the food we ate growing up every day,” Roberts-Thomas says. “The people before me that paid their dues to allow me to be able to do this … their spirit lives within me. I want to do them justice when I am cooking.”

Even though Black women are the reason you can look at menus all over the country and see fried chicken, the impact of Black women in the culinary space extends far beyond that single dish and needs to be acknowledged. It is clear their hands have touched nearly every facet of what we consider American food, yet their achievements are rarely spoken about or celebrated, let alone celebrated to the same degree as many others in the food space. The skills born of necessity during enslavement later became the tools to support their families and their communities, and because of their skill and culinary innovation, the recipes spread throughout the country, leaving dishes that still endure.

We cannot be certain of the first person to fry chicken in America, but everyone who enjoys the Gospel Bird owes a debt to the Black women who cooked under unimaginable conditions to create a better life for themselves and their families. Without their ingenuity, talent, and knowledge, our nation would be far less delicious.

Debra Freeman is a food and cultural anthropologist and writer that focuses on Black culinary history.
Keisha Okafor is a Nigerian-American artist and designer whose work depicts joy and celebrates people.
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