In our search to find the nation’s standout birds, we looked to Eater editors and friends nationwide. The ubiquity of the dish also ensures that nearly every chef comes to fried chicken with some personal attachment, whether they grew up eating a beloved home recipe or they see a hole in the market for an unsung rendition. Many interpretations are rooted in the legacy of slavery and enmeshed with the food cultures of the South, while increasingly immigrants and their descendants are finding audiences for global variations on fried chicken both traditional and avant-garde. In other words, fried chicken is the perfect canvas on which to apply the lenses of culture, history, and personal experience. There are as many different ways to approach fried chicken as there are KFC locations in America (just shy of 4,000). Still, others focus on complements, pairing chicken with fried okra, tamales, chicken livers, roti, pancit, sazon, or kimchi slaw.
Then there are those who are all about setting, whether it’s a food stall at the back of a suburban supermarket or a neon-lit garage in a buzzy nightlife district or a white-brick general store on a country road. For some, the secret is a specific ingredient or technique: dredging in tapioca or rice flour, marinating in soy or adobo or Coca-Cola, flavoring with cayenne or cumin or coriander, and singeing tastebuds with chile paste or hot sauce. Some accomplish it through practice, applying generations of expertise to precisely hone a single recipe, while others cover their bases by turning out superior wings, thighs, nuggets, tenders, drumsticks, or skewers.
Destination fried chicken is a sort of alchemy worth writing home about. Chefs must take ordinary elements and spin them into crisp burnished gold. But if decent fried chicken is commonplace, extraordinary fried chicken is all the more difficult to achieve.
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