Three days after Christmas, in a part of northeast Nashville that many locals describe as “dicey,” a Ford Explorer crashed through the front of a discount-tobacco shop at one end of a strip mall. Police later called the incident an attempted burglary. The vehicle, which had been reported stolen, was propelled by a brick weighting the accelerator. The store was empty—it was four-thirty in the morning. The authorities arrived to find the Ford abandoned and the shop on fire.

Two doors down, just past Jennifer Nails, Tyreese Lawless had come to work early, as usual, to clean the fryers at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. After hearing a boom, he got out of there, in case the flames reached the restaurant. Lawless began calling colleagues—to them, and to generations of customers, Prince’s is a kind of second home. Firefighters went inside and started yanking down ceiling tiles and singed insulation. Ducts and wiring lay exposed, and there was extensive damage from smoke and water. As a precaution, the fire department shut off the strip mall’s gas and electricity. Yellow police tape outside Prince’s front door stretched toward the shattered glass of the targeted bodega.

When Nashville residents learned that Prince’s would be closed indefinitely, a minor panic ensued. In the past decade or so, the restaurant’s signature dish, hot chicken, has proliferated worldwide, and the original incarnation, fried chicken bathed in fiery spices, has been subjected to relentless permutation—tacos, ramen, sushi, oysters, apple fritters, empanadas, pâté, poutine. The invention, now known everywhere as Nashville hot chicken, sounds like a viral novelty, like the cronut, but it long predates Instagram: it became popular more than eighty years ago, in the city’s black community, and the recipe originated with one family, the Princes. After the fire, @ThuggBugg_ tweeted, “Literally any other hot chicken place coulda burned down but it had to be prince’s.” Addressing the driver of the Ford Explorer, @OcifferJJ declared, “All of Nashville hates you sir.”

In November, Eater named Prince’s one of the thirty-eight essential places to dine in America. Six years ago, the James Beard Foundation gave the restaurant its America’s Classics award, which honors “timeless” establishments serving “quality food that reflects the character of its community.” Nashville hot chicken, the foundation said, was a “totemic” creation. The proprietors of Prince’s, and its many imitators, regularly appear on TV food-and-travel shows. Anthony Bourdain, after sampling the hot chicken of a competitor, Bolton’s, said, “I eat many strange and spicy things around the world, but never in my life have I experienced something like this.” He added, “Is it food? Or an initiation ritual for Yankees?”

Such comments can make eating Nashville hot chicken sound like one of those “challenges” in which people choke down spoonfuls of cinnamon. But for many diners the dish is an obsession. In a short documentary for the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Prince’s devotee describes hot chicken as “worse than dope” in its addictiveness. When Isaac Beard, who owned a massage-therapy clinic in Nashville, first ate Prince’s hot chicken, he thought that it was just O.K.; then, about a month later, he woke up in the middle of the night with an enormous craving. “From that moment on, I was licked,” he later told Timothy Charles Davis, the author of “The Hot Chicken Cookbook,” adding, “There’s something legitimate there in hot chicken that’s not there with, say, Buffalo wings.” (Beard now owns a hot-chicken restaurant, Pepperfire, four miles south of Prince’s.)

On Fridays and Saturdays, Prince’s stays open until 4 a.m., and in those early hours graveyard-shift workers share vintage wooden booths with country-music artists and fans emerging from the honky-tonks. A Prince’s employee once said that Beyoncé and Jay-Z always “send somebody down” for takeout when they’re in Nashville. Devotees from out of town are known to head to Prince’s straight from the airport. In the Reddit thread FoodPorn, someone once reported that a friend “flew from Nashville with Prince’s Hot Chicken in hand like she was carrying a donor organ.”

Ira Kaplan, of the indie band Yo La Tengo, heard about Prince’s from Richard Baluyut, of the band Versus. Kaplan has recalled, “We were told it came in ‘mild,’ ‘medium,’ ‘hot,’ and ‘extra-hot,’ but if we’d never been there before we would not be allowed to have extra-hot. We asked if we could at least taste ‘extra-hot sauce.’ What rubes we were—we were informed that there is no sauce.” Kaplan found Prince’s hot chicken “simultaneously delicious and practically inedible.” He ate it four days in a row. The band wrote a song about it, “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1),” and then another, “Don’t Say a Word (Hot Chicken #2),” and then another, “Return to Hot Chicken.”

Cayenne pepper is the only confirmed ingredient in Prince’s hot chicken, which one customer calls spicy “down to the bone.” Photograph by Irina Rozovsky for The New Yorker

The weekend of the Ford Explorer crash, Prince’s had been expected to be even busier than usual: the Tennessee Titans were at home, playing the Indianapolis Colts, and the Predators, Nashville’s popular hockey team, were also in town. One vehicle after another pulled into the empty parking lot and idled, the occupants confounded by the “closed” sign.

The day after the crash, the woman who has been called the “queen mother” of Nashville hot chicken, André Prince Jeffries, drove to Prince’s and parked in her usual spot, four feet from the front door. Jeffries, who is in her early seventies, has run the restaurant since 1980. She wears glamorous hair styles, plum-colored lipstick, a smoky eye, and long lacquered nails. (That day’s shade was lavender.) She also had on gray sweatpants, a matching shawl, Ugg-style boots, and a red-and-purple crocheted cap. Enormous earrings dangled halfway to her chin. When she knows she’ll be interviewed on camera, she may dress in a Prince’s T-shirt; otherwise, she does not advertise. She regularly declines offers to open franchises—she recently rejected a request from Dubai—and to star in reality-TV shows.

Clutching a cane, Jeffries made her way into Prince’s, where a few employees had started cleaning up. Spotting a brick near the front door, she shrieked, “Is that the brick that was on the accelerator?” Her event planner, Katrina Ware, laughed and said, “Naw, that brick’s in evidence now.” Jeffries said, “Have mercy!” Her tinkly voice is laced with cackle and rasp.

People eat at Prince’s because of the chicken but also because of the story behind it. Jeffries has spent the better part of her adulthood recounting the legend, for she inherited both the recipe (which is secret) and the family lore (which is unverifiable). In the nineteen-thirties, her great-uncle Thornton Prince III was a handsome pig farmer and fond of women. One Saturday night, he dragged home late, angering his girlfriend. The next day, Prince asked her to make his favorite food, fried chicken. The girlfriend complied, but with a furious twist: she saturated the bird in cayenne pepper and other spices.

No doubt, Prince was expected to suffer, and did—but he also enjoyed the experience. He began replicating the spicy fried chicken and selling it on weekends, out of his home. He eventually opened a small restaurant, the BBQ Chicken Shack, which became beloved in the black community. It became popular with white people, too, especially after the restaurant moved to a location near the Grand Ole Opry. Under Jim Crow, the Princes were not free to dine wherever and however they wanted, or to use the front door of white establishments, but they never told their own customers where to sit or what door to use. The matter handled itself: black patrons sat up front; whites entered through the back door and sat in back.