The first time I went to Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, I was 12 years old, and I didn’t even eat the chicken. My dad, though, ordered his “hot” — one of six heat levels spicy enough to force beads of sweat from one’s brow onto the table, one soft drop at a time. While he ate, he remarked that the heat radiating from the plate didn’t just linger in the air or settle on your lips, it sat with you for days afterward. As the old ceiling fans helicoptered above, I sat silently in the pew-like booth, flirting with some fries that had absorbed a whisper of heat from sharing the same cast-iron skillet as the chicken, but never mustering the courage to take a bite.

My dad, undeterred, took me and my sister back again and again over the years. Eventually, we learned to sweat together, and I saw that the world was much bigger than home: Prince’s was a visit to “the other side of the tracks,” 30 minutes from the mostly white suburb where I grew up. My hometown, just north of Nashville, was the kind of place where the most thrilling food was a cheese-smothered appetizer at O’Charley’s and where, when I’d try to explain hot chicken to friends at school, they would ask with a bewildered look if I meant buffalo chicken. Looking back, I realize now that Prince’s was one of the few places we’d go and see people who looked like us.

Not too long ago, I was sitting in a restaurant in Chicago that serves hot takes on Southern food; one of those places where whiskey signs blanket the walls and everyone drinks craft microbrews from artisanally hand-blown mason jars. On the menu, next to spare ribs that had allegedly been “slow cooked for days” and cornbread that was probably too dry, was hot chicken. The menu described it as “Nashville hot!” and warned the eater to beware the fire. (I can report that the eater need not worry.) I looked around — surveying the Southern-inspired cocktails gliding across the dining room toward tables of people who’d probably never crossed the proverbial train tracks for chicken — and I wondered: How did hot chicken, a dish that, 10 years ago, was barely known even just a few miles outside of Nashville, get here?

There is a bit of hot chicken everywhere right now: KFC’s Nashville Hot Chicken is a “spicy bird with a savory burn,” while Shack Shack has declared “it’s getting hot in here” with its Hot Chik’n sandwich, both available nationwide; Chicago and Los Angeles are positively obsessed, with numerous temples to the dish; and if a hot chicken shack hasn’t been announced in your city yet, just wait.

Yet nowhere has hot chicken become so conspicuously ubiquitous in recent years than in Nashville, where food has begun to rival country music as the city’s premier cultural icon. More than a dozen dedicated restaurants have opened over the last several years, from Pepperfire Hot Chicken to Hattie B’s, which, despite an additional location in Birmingham and another on the way in Atlanta, remains the spot for any tourist rushing to grab the requisite Nashville ’gram. Some of these hot chicken shacks even have valet parking. A popular local brewery, Tailgate Beer, has created a Hot Chicken IPA; ramen shop Otaku South serves a hot chicken bao; the renowned Indian restaurant Chauhan’s serves it with ghost pepper sauce; and that’s to say nothing of the stream of restaurants slated to open in the next year plotting their own spins on hot chicken. As Danny Chau wrote in the Ringer last year, paraphrasing Anthony Bourdain, surveying the hot chicken scene in Nashville is now a multi-day commitment. (Prince’s Hot Chicken is on Eater’s list of essential Southern restaurants and its National 38 list.)

Maybe the best way to describe what is happening is “hotchickenfrication,” a term coined by Timothy Charles Davis in The Hot Chicken Cookbook. The word hasn’t gained much traction yet — too many syllables, maybe — but eating around town, there’s an overwhelming sense of a deliberate effort to give the dish center stage in a Disneyfied version of Nashville. In the process, hot chicken’s actual history, its particular origins in a distinct community, has been diluted, transforming it into a pale echo of what it was — a spicy but soulless joyride.

What you might call “hashtag hot chicken” is the kind served at Party Fowl, a restaurant that once provided the official hot chicken of the Tennessee Titans football team. Last summer, over plates of its signature hot chicken with bourbon-glazed beignets — a play on chicken and waffles — and hot chicken lollipops, Bart Pickens, the executive chef, who moved to Nashville from New Orleans in 2006, explained the broad appeal of his menu. “ You can take our menu to Chicago; it’s got enough reflection,” he told me, referring to Party Fowl’s wide variety of hot chicken dishes, from poutine to Cuban sandwiches. “If I’ve got to make a Giordano’s deep-dish hot chicken pizza, I can go there.” (He has gone there; I’ve seen the pictures.)

While longtime hot chicken aficionados may cringe, Pickens sees the trend as a natural evolution of local tradition. “Food is up for interpretation,” he said. “My philosophy has always been, you have to know the original to go forward with it.”

Pickens’s views echo those of many of the Nashville chefs I spoke to over the last year. They believe hot chicken is a larger-than-life dish that is fair game for their own interpretations, so they are capitalizing off the trend with a clear conscience despite the dish’s singular creation, rooted in a specific time and place in the city. But the history these chefs and new hot chicken dishes refer to is a tall tale, one they often don’t even fully understand. “There’s nothing worse than a scorned woman,” Pickens said, looking over the vast tableau of hot chicken iterations on the table between us. “How does that story go?”

By now, more people than not have probably heard the origin story of hot chicken. But it is so good that it bears repeating: It begins with Thornton Prince, who, according to his family and the one photograph I’ve seen of him, was very handsome. Back in the 1930s, he was known to spend his evenings enjoying alcohol and flirting with women, even though he had a “steady girl” at home (a character who always remains nameless when the story is told).

One morning, Prince stumbled into the house after a long night out and went to sleep. Though his lover had long resigned herself to his late arrivals, according to his great-niece, André Prince Jeffries, who now owns the restaurant and goes by Ms. André, something changed that morning — maybe the hint of perfume on his shirt was too strong or there was a smudge of lipstick on his collar. Either way, Prince’s lover sought vengeance.

Prince’s favorite food was fried chicken, and his lover knew that, making it the perfect vehicle for her pain. While he was sleeping, she went out to the garden behind the house and grabbed a bunch of cayenne peppers she’d grown, then started frying some chicken. As the chicken cooked, she created an unbearably hot spice mix with the cayenne. When the chicken came out of the skillet, still sizzling, she tossed an enormous amount of seasoning all over the bird, thinking it would be agonizingly inedible. Prince awoke and stumbled into the kitchen, almost tripping over the aroma. He took a seat at the kitchen table in front of the pile of chicken; his lover watched, anticipating the first bite of revenge. Her plan was thwarted immediately: Prince loved the chicken so much he wanted more.

The unnamed woman, the mystery mother of hot chicken, left Prince shortly afterward and his family never saw her again. But he became desperate to replicate the recipe, endlessly experimenting with spices until he was finally able to recreate it. He soon became a hot chicken evangelist and opened his own shack to serve it to the public. According to legend, for decades, he was the only person cooking hot chicken.

Speaking with the Prince family, no one could say how much of the legend is true, though most will readily admit that not every detail is factually accurate. Few other records exist, which has only made this story more essential to the Prince’s brand over the years. Despite the story’s many variations and exaggerations, one detail remains indisputably and undeniably true: Hot chicken started in the Prince family.

Around 1945, a few years after hot chicken was supposedly created, Prince opened Prince’s BBQ Chicken Shack on Jefferson Street and 28th Avenue, in the then–predominantly black neighborhood Hadley Park. Despite the restaurant’s name, it didn’t serve barbecue, just hot chicken. It was only open in the evenings, after Prince finished his day job, and on Friday and Saturday nights it was open until 4 a.m. The late-night hangout quickly became a neighborhood institution for anyone with a taste for heat. After a few years, Prince moved the restaurant downtown to an area known as Hell’s Half Acre (named for gunfights that occurred in the 1800s), only blocks away from the Ryman Auditorium, a legendary concert hall that was home to the Grand Ole Opry.

Over time, the clientele expanded, and Prince’s became especially popular amongst the country music singers who frequented Ryman Auditorium, exposing it to a new audience: white people. Word spread, and as white audiences left country shows on Friday and Saturday nights, they wanted to try the underground restaurant they’d heard about, which was also one of the few late-night eateries in the area. “It was a secret in Nashville,” Ms. André told me. “They came in through the backdoor and had their own place.” Throwing back her dark, feathered hair and sipping on a soda, she laughed as she described the space, a “room with no windows,” that she visited a handful of times as a child.

Ms. André’s smile grew wider as she recounted the story: At Prince’s, black people ate in the front while white people ate in the back, a radical inversion of Nashville’s Jim Crow laws at the time. It’s no wonder that hot chicken remained an underground dish, exclusive to Nashville’s black community for decades: White people in Tennessee didn’t want to be seen eating it in public.

After Thornton Prince died in the 1970s, the shack was run by different members of the Prince family before it wound up in the hands of Ms. André in the early 1980s. A government worker who’d recently gone through a divorce, she never considered running the restaurant until her mother — Prince’s niece — urged her to take over the shack. For the last 30 years, she has spent nearly every day at Prince’s, except for Sundays, when it’s closed.

In 1988, Ms. André moved Prince’s to its current location on Ewing Drive in Nashville’s north side, the heart of the city’s black community at the time. She also dropped “BBQ” from the name. A few years later, she started tweaking the offerings. At first, she left the legendary chicken untouched, simply adding french fries and dessert to Prince’s bare-bones menu. But then she had a revelation and decided to expand Prince’s palette from a single note (the current “medium” heat level, also called “original hot”) to six levels of fire, the two spiciest of which she won’t even eat.

For the next 20 years, Prince’s flourished. There were few imitators and no real competition except for Columbo’s, a hot chicken shack opened in the late ’70s by Bolton Polk, a former Prince’s cook, miles away in downtown Nashville. Things were relatively quiet, and the heat was under control in Ms. André’s kitchen — until it wasn’t.

The creation myth of hot chicken as Nashville’s culinary staple isn’t as well known as the origin story, but it’s getting there (Rachel L. Martin’s version in the Bitter Southerner is a particularly complete one). That overwhelming sense of a deliberate plan to make the dish a city icon? It’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s true.

In the late-1990s, Nashville began construction on a new football stadium meant to lure an NFL team to the city. Columbo’s, the only hot chicken shack in downtown Nashville, was razed to make room for the Adelphia Coliseum (now the Nissan Stadium), which opened in 1999 as the home of the Tennessee Titans and the Tennessee State Tigers. Bill Purcell, a state congressman and lawyer who worked nearby, ate at Columbo’s nearly every week before it was leveled, having fallen deeply, madly in love with hot chicken. (The Polk family has since opened Bolton’s Spicy Chicken and Fish down the street from the original shack.) One day, after Columbo’s demise, Purcell’s unsatisfied cravings got the best of him, and he found himself driving miles from downtown to eat at a place he had heard about but never experienced: Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack.

To his incredible delight, Prince’s chicken was even better than Columbo’s. The flavors were more complex, the heat more agreeable, and the chicken much juicier. The chicken at Prince’s was and is the best he’s ever had, something he continues to tell anyone who will listen as hot chicken begins to sprout all over the city. Sitting with him in the same booth I’d sat in as a child, on a Friday afternoon last year, I could see the love spread across his face as he recounted the tale in between nibbles on a leg (original hot) and sips of a soda.

One of the first things Purcell did to show his dedication to Prince’s was ensure that the shack remained within his district. “I was involved in gerrymandering,” Purcell told me with a smile. “I did insist, if at all possible, that in the new maps Prince’s Hot Chicken would be in my district.” He went on to clarify that the gesture was harmless, because the area was commercial and he didn’t garner any additional votes in the process. “It just made me happy knowing that I represented Prince’s Hot Chicken,” he said. Represent it he did: On the day he retired from the Tennessee House of Representatives, in 1996, he put through a resolution declaring Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack the best restaurant in Tennessee — a surprise to the Prince family, as well as the many people in the state who had never heard of it.

After a short stint at Vanderbilt, Purcell became the mayor of Nashville in 1999. He maintained his “fanboy” status with regular visits while in office (Prince’s set aside an official seat so he didn’t have to wait in line). In 2007, as his second term was coming to a close and the city’s 200th birthday approached, he had a realization: Nashville’s only “indigenous food,” to his knowledge, was hot chicken. “There was no better or more appropriate thought than to have a hot chicken festival,” Purcell said.

The festival was meant to introduce locals to a dish that had been under their noses for years and to establish hot chicken as the food of Nashville. As Purcell began planning, Ms. André agreed to anchor the event. Though Prince’s had never even put out advertising, the offer to reach thousands of new customers seemed too good to pass up. “Most of Nashville at the time hadn’t eaten it before or had access or found themselves here,” Purcell said.

On July 4, 2007, the inaugural hot chicken festival took place in East Nashville, not too far from Prince’s original shack in Hadley Park. Prince’s, as well as a couple of vendors who had emerged over the years, served their takes on hot chicken amid live music. “We had half as many vendors as we do now, but thousands of Nashvillians appeared,” Purcell said as he took a swig of his diet soda. “We gave out free samples. People came early, people stayed late. They had a good time.” For Prince’s, the plan worked as billed: After endless lines at the festival, the restaurant saw an influx of new customers who had never experienced hot chicken before.

The festival was so successful that Purcell decided to keep it going after the bicentennial. Since leaving office, he has spearheaded the event, helping it grow into one of Nashville’s largest annual festivals. In recent years, the hot chicken competition has become a proving ground for chefs looking to make their own mark on hot chicken. Winning is an instant stamp of approval from the hot chickenerati, a virtual guarantee that a recipe can stand on its own. Both Hattie B’s and Party Fowl credit the competition as the crucible in which their own, now-famous versions of hot chicken were forged. In this creation myth, the festival has become the birthplace of hot chicken, the Nashville icon and viral phenomenon, for better or for worse.

Last year, which Food Republic dubbed “the year of hot chicken,” the publication made another, more remarkable declaration: that John Lasater, the executive chef of Hattie B’s, was “the man who launched the Nashville hot chicken craze.” Immediate backlash tore through Nashville’s tightly knit hot chicken community. “If, at this point, you’re still writing articles where black people have been doing shit for years, going mostly unnoticed by white people, and it’s only when the white people come in and decide to monetize it that you declare it cool,” Betsy Phillips wrote in Nashville Scene, the local alt-weekly paper, “then you are the problem with America.”

Many others rallied behind that sentiment. The articles bounced from private Facebook group to private Facebook group, where the debate seemed unending. Follow-up essays were written by other food experts to provide context. Hot chicken had transformed from a food consumed on the other side of the tracks to an emblem of a major city. As intrigue blossomed around the politics of hot chicken, it was clear how divisive the dish had become.

Hattie B’s stayed silent in the face of the controversy, which eventually passed by. “You have to wait in line,” a young white woman who recently moved to Nashville from Mississippi told me outside of its midtown location, not long after the blow up last year. “It’s like Disney World, but not as expensive and just as hot.” She and two friends had been waiting for 30 minutes and weren’t even halfway through the parking lot.

When I initially reached out to Hattie B’s to chat with either Lasater or the Bishop family, who owns the restaurant, they seemed cautious. There was some back-and-forth on what exactly I’d ask and why, and a spokesperson eventually confirmed an in-person interview with a member of the Bishop family. But as the day drew closer, she asked if we could conduct the interview over email. After I sent my questions, some of which addressed the controversy, the spokesperson stopped responding to my emails.

Around the time of the Hattie B’s controversy, Prince’s opened a second location, called Prince’s Hot Chicken South, as well as a food truck. (Hotville Chicken, the acclaimed Los Angeles pop-up launched by Ms. André’s niece, has no affiliation with Prince’s beyond familial relation.) Ms. André was initially against opening a new location, but as she watched the dish her family created sweep the country, making corporations and other people rich, she became convinced that expansion was the only way to fight for the Prince’s legacy.

When I spoke to Ms. André last fall, it was clear that she was nervous about the new venture. “It’s so personal,” she told me as she looked around the busy restaurant. “If you franchise something like this, you miss all of that intimacy.” Still, she finds herself flirting with the idea of creating a Prince’s franchise, which is the brainchild of Mario Hambrick, a businessman who has worked for Ms. André for so long that she calls him “son.”

Hambrick, a local entrepreneur with a handful of businesses, including Free at Last Bail Bonding, is the primary investor in the new restaurants, having acquired the food truck and negotiated the deal for the new space. Ms. André hopes that her grandchildren will take an interest in the family business when they’re older, like her daughter has in recent years, but it’s clear that Hambrick is vying to be next in line — and that he has a clear vision for the future of Prince’s.

“I could remember when we first started allowing other hot chicken restaurants,” Hambrick told me, recounting the first years of the city’s hot chicken festival and the booths that have since become perpetually packed restaurants all over the city. “They passed out fliers — they had 10 people in their line and we had 500. They would then invite people to their tent,” he said, explaining how other vendors used the lines at Prince’s to attract people to their tents, which had shorter waits.

As Hambrick talked, his resentment toward everyone who has capitalized on the Prince’s legacy, especially from outside of the community, became palpable. Unlike Ms. André, who maintains a regal confidence in Prince’s reputation as first and best, he is aggrieved. “Everybody wants to take the torch and run with it,” he said. There is, for instance, no small amount of irony in the ad campaign for KFC’s hot chicken, in which the dish is portrayed in the same manner as rock and roll in the 1960s — rock and roll being a cultural touchstone that was pilfered from black creators and then whitewashed so that it could be sold to white America.

So, it’s here, miles from downtown, that Prince’s has started its fight for the future of hot chicken. Prince’s South is a model for how Ms. André and Hambrick could franchise the brand as hot chicken goes global — even if it means more work for Ms. André, who had begun toying with the idea of retirement. “Sometimes I think about what it’d be like to be on vacation every day for the rest of my life,” she said, referring to the fact that she wouldn’t need to work if she just sold it all. “But then I know I’d get bored after a while, and I stop thinking about it.”

Prince’s South is quite different from the original: A mural of Thornton Prince on the back wall, based on previous signage at the original, is the only real similarity between the two. Large televisions cover the walls, while a full bar — a first for Prince’s — juts out near the cash register. The tables, missing the signature picnic tablecloth, have a shiny wood finish. It looks a lot like the inside of a Buffalo Wild Wings.

I brought my dad to get his opinion of the dish he introduced to me more than 15 years ago. We ordered medium, the original spice level. Less than 10 minutes after our order was placed, the food arrived, which made my dad perk up immediately — it’s widely quipped that the longer you wait for hot chicken, the better it is, because you know it hasn’t been sitting under heat lamps all day. As we dug into the chicken thighs, our hands took on that familiar fiery red tint. We stopped talking for a moment to take a bite. I looked to my dad as he stared down at the chicken. Without taking a breath or looking up, he said, “It’s just not the same.”

Zach Stafford is the editor-in-chief of INTO and the host of Eater’s forthcoming documentary, Boystown .

Joe Buglewicz is a photographer based in Nashville.

Fact checked and copy edited by Amirah Mercer

Sign up for the newsletter Eater.com The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy. Subscribe

Can’t see the above signup form? Click here to subscribe to Eater’s newsletter.