Eating on the road: Penny's Hot Chicken in Toronto

 As chronicled previously, Nashville Hot Chicken is all the rage these days. Very on trend. And when delivered in chicken sandwich form it ticks several boxes for me. So finding myself in Toronto over the lunching hour recently, some googling brought me to Penny's Hot Chicken near Yonge Dundas Square.

It's actually a few blocks North of Dundas, on Yonge, in kind of a mini food court with several other restaurants with minimal seating; an interesting concept to save on downtown rent and seems designed to cater more to the take-out office worker and Uber Eats crowd than dine-in customers.

Still, a friend and I found a table at the back and went to the counter to make our orders. They have tenders, platters and lots of different fry options, but I was in sammy-mode and ordered the Hot Mac sandwich, described as a medium-spiced thigh with lettuce, green onions, pickles (which I held), nacho cheese and comeback sauce on sliced bread. 

Sandwiches come with one side and one dipping sauce. Not being a fry guy, I opted to try the mac & cheese wedges and nacho cheese sauce. Other side options include fries, fried pickles, potato salad and coleslaw. But I figured with the lettuce and green onions I had veggies covered.

Everything was cooked (deep fried) fresh, and was ready in about 10 minutes. The sandwich was piping hot, which was great. A few variations from the menu description: it came on a brioche bun instead of two slices of bread -- I am more than fine with that. The described lettuce was also missing, leaving me short of my required serving of veggies or the day.

I would not order this side again -- the mac and cheese wedges were generic and bland. And I would go with a dipping sauce with some heat.

The sammy, though, was fantastic. The chicken thigh (the best chicken to use for sammies) was juicy and delicious, pounded down and generously breaded to be just huge. A big battered chicken tongue sticking out of the bun seems to be a signature for them. It was fun to tackle and offered a natural starting place to begin eating the sammy. Next time I'll up the heat, as a medium really did nothing. But it was delicious and filling and offers excellent lunch value at $13.90 before tax.

Either time your visit carefully though or be ready to carry out, as seating is very limited.

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Eating on the Hill: A&W's not so hot Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich

The newest chicken craze is Nashville Hot Chicken, and A&W is out of the gates early with the first fast food version, available now for a limited time: the A&W Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich.

 I've already written at length about the chicken sandwich wars; Popeye's is the undisputed winner and I stand by that. Especially if you can get it freshly made; then it's transcendent. But in the next tier down of your basic fast good chicken sammies, A&W's Chubby Chicken stands out from the pack for being a juicy, decently sized, well-seasoned breast of chicken.

I've been coming back into the office lately now that I'm fully vaxed and local case numbers are down, and an A&W opened up just off the Hill during the pandemic (O'Connor and Sparks, between Winners and the LRT). So I'm locally lunching again, and had to try their Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich.

I ordered on the app so I could just walk in and pick it up, and the app makes it easier to customize too. It comes standard with the hot sauce and pickles. I dropped the pickets and added lettuce and tomato, so I still had my veg. A&W does a good job of the veg for a fast food place.

Dine-in is still closed and it was a sunny day, so I took my bag and retired to an outdoor table on Sparks Street to enjoy the weather and dine al-fresco. 

I haven't had a lot of Nashville Hot Chicken but I'm familiar with the concept. The legend is that a woman, in Nashville of course, tired of her husband's philandering and desirous of revenge, made him fried chicken and smothered it with the spiciest sauce she could concoct, hoping to repay the pain she caused him. Instead, he loved it. In the commercial application pain isn't the goad, but chicken coated in a spicy sauce is still the basic idea.

This...was not that. It was a standard chicken breast, with some sauce on the top bun and some sauce on the top bun. Not coated in it at all. And the sauce wasn't particularly hot and wasn't particularly good. It had a weird taste, maybe a bit tangy, but I wasn't really getting spicy from it. They call it a hot Nashville aioli. So, I guess mayo and some sort of hot sauce. A brioche bun, because that's on trend but doesn't really mean anything in wide practice.

So I walked back to the office full but not impressed. If you want Nashville Hot Chicken, go somewhere else doing it right. If you're going to A&W anyway though and you want a chicken sandwich, give it a try.

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Eating in lockdown: Hanley's Nashville Hot Chicken

We've lived through the chicken wing era, the fancy burger era, and the Ramen era. Right now, I believe we're in the Nashville Hot Chicken era. And like all food trends they take their time to come to Ottawa but come during this lockdown it has and this week I tried one of the new local entrants: Hanley's Nashville Hot Chicken.

It seems to be a pop-up that moves around the city, most recently landing downtown at Queen Street Fare. I ordered it from Uber Eats though for my weekly Wednesday purchased meal. The chicken tendie combo comes with three tendies (I added one for a fee), crinkle fries which I upgraded to cheesy, corn bread and pickles. There was also a small cup of dipping sauce and a slightly larger but still small cup of pickled slaw. I also added a mac & cheese side, because I'm all about that mac and cheese. You can also choose from a scale of hotness for your tendies -- I went with medium.

Supposedly the origin story behind Nashville Hot Chicken is that a wife was very unhappy with her husband, I'm sure for very good reasons. Wanting to bring the pain, she made him fried chicken but unknown to him tried to make it scorching painfully hot. The result though was not what she hoped for -- he loved it. Not sure if they stayed together, but it made the leap to a local Nashville restaurant and spread from there.

Anyway, the dish arrived in a box that got rather jumbled together on the drive across Centretown. I'll dispense with the cornbread - I don't care for cornbread. I also don't like pickles. I don't really care for thicker fries like the crinkle cut (I'm a thin fry boy) but the cheese sauce, which had a mild kick, made them tasty. The less cheesy fried did not get eaten -- could have been crispier also.

The chicken was the star attraction though. They were big and fairly juicy, and as any portable chicken aficionado knows it's chicken tender>chicken strip>chicken finger. They're breaded but not saucy, the powdered heat comes from the coating. And it's a slow heat that took some time to hit me. Still, I didn't find it that hot and should have gone with the hot instead of the medium. It was tasty, but the breading didn't adhere to well and began to come off with minor handling. Still, was a good lunch. Would like to try it in sandwich form next time.

The mac and cheese was just OK. It had cheese, but it lacked any creamy saucy element. Need the cheese saucy for good mac and cheese. At least they used macaroni though, points for that.

I believe there are one or two other Nashville Hot Chicken offerings in town, so more exploration still to do.

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