KFC's new menu item is already a legend in one part of the country, but the new chicken dish isn't yet available in its namesake city.
The chicken chain is promoting the new Nashville Hot Chicken with an eight-city food-truck tour, kicking off on Thursday. The food truck will stop in cities and towns with no KFC nearby that all happened to be named Nashville, starting in Nashville Village, Ohio and ending in Nashville Town, North Carolina.
The truck will not, however, stop in Nashville, Tennessee, despite the fact that Nashville Hot Chicken is crafted in the style of a Tennessee culinary icon.
"Hot chicken is indisputably Nashville's iconic food: simple in concept, its aggressive flavor isn't one you'll soon forget," Susannah Felts wrote of the dish in Serious Eats last January. "Hot chicken takes something unassailably Southern, heavy, and indulgent — I'm talking regular fried chicken — and makes that dish seem like sissy food."
That's a tall order to replicate, especially when trying to make the dish palatable to customers around the US who may not be used to the super-spicy Southern style. So far, the item has been tested in Pittsburgh, where it received rave reviews— but not in Nashville, Tennessee.
The menu item is rolling out on the tail end of a particularly trendy year for spicy fried chicken. From the world of fast food, with Chick-fil-A on an expansion spree, to celebrity chefs, with Momofuku's David Chang opening fried-chicken concept Fuku, spicy chicken was everywhere in 2015.
KFC has not yet revealed when Nashville Hot Chicken will hit all 4,300 locations, but, hopefully for the company, it will be before the hot-chicken trend loses its fire.
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