a joint · TNPrince's Hot Chicken Shack

The Nashville hot chicken shack, started by James Thornton Prince and run since 1980 by his great-niece André Prince Jeffries. Chicken — breast, thigh or wing — is marinated, floured, fried to order and painted with a cayenne paste, then served on white bread under pickle slices. Everybody else's hot chicken is measured against it.

The family story is that hot chicken began as revenge. Thornton Prince was, by the account his own family tells, a womanizer; after a late Saturday night a girlfriend cooked him fried chicken loaded with pepper. He liked it. He and his brothers built their own recipe and opened the Bar-B-Que Chicken Shack. Wikipedia gives 1945 for the business and says the current style of spice paste may only date to the mid-1970s, with spicy fried chicken in Nashville's Black neighbourhoods long before either.

The café started at 28th Avenue and Jefferson Street, then moved downtown into Hell's Half Acre near the Ryman Auditorium, where Opry stars came after the show. Under segregation the house built a separate room for white guests, who walked through the main dining room and the kitchen to reach it. In 1988 it moved to Ewing Drive in East Nashville.

When Thornton Prince died his brother Will took over; Will's wife Maude ran it after him. In 1980 Maude decided that Thornton's great-niece André Prince Jeffries should have it, and Jeffries dropped the BBQ out of the name.

In December 2018 a Ford Explorer drove into the strip mall holding the Ewing Drive shop and set it on fire. The restaurant itself was not damaged and Jeffries expected two weeks; damage to the building and the landlord's delays turned it into a permanent closure announced seven months later. That location had run since 1989.

Jeffries recorded an oral history with the Southern Foodways Alliance on 7 July 2006, for the Nashville Eats project: no advertising, word of mouth for eighteen years, three heats, chicken fried only after the order, a thirty-minute wait, and her own term for the aftermath, "24-hour chicken."

Marinate, flour, fry to order, then paste. The cayenne paste goes on with a spoon and gloves and is squeezed into the crust by hand. It lands on white bread with pickle chips, and the bread takes the grease and some of the heat.

Four locations in September 2026: Prince's Hot Chicken South at 5814 Nolensville Pike, a stall in Assembly Food Hall at 5055 Broadway, Tanger Outlets on Cane Ridge Parkway, and a counter at Nashville International Airport by the C/D concourse. A Jefferson Street shop is announced as coming.