At the more conventional space to which it relocated several years ago, the overall aesthetic is practically grandfathered in among the neighborhood’s glass-towered hypergentrification, and has elevated the fried-chicken box - spiced with little more than cayenne, paprika, and salt - into something of a new classic. Pies ’n’ Thighs dates to 2006, when its talented cooks famously joined forces in the back of a scrappy bar and intuitively split the difference between hipster diner food and matter-of-fact Southern bona fides. The brined meat is tender, aromatic, and full of flavor on its own, but nonetheless benefits from a dip into the accompanying salt-and-pepper blend as well as a sweet-and-sour sauce composed of garlic, Korean chile, cinnamon, and ketchup that further elevates each bite. Whole birds are broken down into chopstick-friendly morsels that arrive sealed in a slightly sweet, golden-brown, and buttery batter that evokes Korean streusel-capped soboro bread. Fortunately, Korean soul-food spot Her Name is Han treats this maxim as sacrosanct. When all is said and done, the whole point of fried chicken is the crust. It’s not just dinner - it’s an event, to be washed down with a round of Tiger Lagers or, if you like, a bottle of Champagne. Ten years later, he looks like a genius pioneer in the chef-driven poultry category, and Momofuku Noodle Bar’s fried-chicken dinners, though $50 more expensive and climbing ($500 buys you a caviar supplement!), remain the gold standard of the high-low large-format feed, the best way to demolish a couple birds with seven of your closest friends, and the ultimate inducer of order envy among the noodle-slurping hoi polloi. When David Chang unleashed his reservation-only, $100 fried-chicken feast back in 2009, some folks thought he was meshugenah. Two whole fried chickens cooked two ways: Old Bay-seasoned southern-style and spicy-glazed Korean, served with neither mac n’ cheese nor pickled daikon but moo shoo pancakes, Bibb lettuce, a slew of sauces, and a basket of Greenmarket herbs. The chicken almost always arrives too hot to eat, but that stops exactly no one from digging in. The standard order, as always, is a plate of golden, shaggy, and enigmatically juicy thighs the approximate size and shape of pre-ice-sheet-melt Greenland. The general late-night vibe is vaguely waterlogged and “people yelling at each other” in a bar space not much larger than a storage container filled with 1960s cocktail kitsch, but who cares - that chicken is very good. The result is top-of-the-Scoville-charts hot, fairly juicy, and, at $10 a pop, all the rage among the LaGuardia Community College students across the street. Later, along with potatoes cut into wedges, it’s rubbed down in a secret spice blend more closely guarded than the Colonel’s, cloaked in cornstarch, and deep-fried to a fare-thee-well. Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeldīoneless thigh meat from a halal butcher is chopped into pieces and soaked in Greek yogurt with ginger and garlic. The chicken comes glazed with spicy honey in a silver bowl or platter, and it’s so fiendishly good it’s restricted to the bar area - for fear, no doubt, that otherwise the kitchen would be up to its eyeballs in fried-chicken tickets. These birds are salt-cured, double-dipped in seasoned flour, and by some advanced frying technique cooked until the crust is as crunchy as a Greenpeace sidewalk solicitor. Someone up top, however, eventually deemed the stuff fit for public consumption, and that is good news for fried-chicken aficionados. Like a lot of the best things you find on menus these days, the fried chicken at the Beatrice Inn began as a “family” meal, one of those rustic, supposedly not-ready-for-prime-time snacks the line cooks hog for themselves.
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