Can your tongue take it? Fresno restaurant’s chicken is so spicy, a waiver’s involved
This new restaurant in Fresno makes you sign a waiver if you order a meal with its spiciest chicken.
Seriously.
It says so right on the menu.
Angry Chickz opens at 11 a.m. Thursday, at the northeast corner of Shaw and West avenues, next to Round Table Pizza. It specializes in Nashville-style hot chicken.
What’s that? Basically really spicy fried chicken. For those of us who don’t have something to prove, however, they have non spicy chicken and a few more moderately spiced choices.
It’s a trend born in Nashville that has been spreading nationwide the past few years. At Angry Chickz, it’s fried chicken tenders that are dunked in a bath of spicy oil and butter and then coated in a dry rub made from spicy peppers.
It goes back to Prince’s Hot Chicken, a Nashville restaurant selling a recipe that was invented in the 1930s.
Legend has it that Thornton Prince, known for being a bit of a lady’s man, cheated on his regular gal. She was so enraged she made him fried chicken, but slathered it with enough spicy ingredients to make him hurt, said Angry Chickz owner and CEO David Mkhitaryan.
“He ends up loving it,’ he said. “He ends up telling her, ‘Hey sweetheart, this is great. Can you make some more tomorrow?”
Angry Chickz uses a recipe Mkhitaryan developed and sells at the three other Angry Chickz restaurants he owns in in the Los Angeles area.
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The menu
The tenders are served in a variety of ways: As two sliders with coleslaw, pickles and fries, open-faced over a slice of white bread, a combination of those two, or over buttery white rice with the slaw and pickles.
“It’s amazing. You have to try it,” Mkhitaryan said. It’s “fried chicken coming into heat levels where it’s going to hurt you and gives you a high.”
Customers choose their heat from six levels, ranging from country (no spice) to hot, extra hot and angry, which requires the waiver.
Mkhitaryan loves spicy food, but the angry is something else, he said.
“I had to taste test it and it was not pleasant,” he said.
How many CEOs say that about their food?
It’s made from ghost peppers and the Carolina reaper, a gnarly red pepper with a little devilish tail. It was bred by a man who owned the PuckerButt Pepper Co. in South Carolina.
Nashville hot chicken isn’t brand new to Fresno, of course. Westwoods BBQ & Spice Co. has a Nashville hot chicken sandwich on its menu, and so do all three locations of The Mad Duck Craft Brewing Co.’s brew pubs and restaurants. Even some KFC restaurants have it on the menu.
But Nashville hot chicken is pretty much most of what Angry Chickz serves.
You can get sides like mac and cheese and angry fries, which are french fries with chopped chicken tenders, coleslaw, pickles, slathered in “comeback sauce.” Comeback sauce isn’t spicy, but more creamy and tangy. That sauce got its name from a Greek restaurant in Mississippi, that may or may not have something to do with Southerners saying “Y’all come back” instead of goodbye.
Mkhitaryan is working on a fifth location in Southern California. He’s not from Fresno, but lived here from age 18 to 28 and thought the city could use something fun like this, he said.
Nashville hot chicken is known as “the bird that bites you back,” Mkhitaryan said. The restaurant actually used to be called Angry Birdz until after it was sued by the makers of the “Angry Birds” game.
Hence, the mascot, a cute but angry chicken that’s dabbing, doing the dance move that sends its beak in one direction and its wings in the other.
The restaurant has its grand opening at 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 23. It will raffle off a large-screen TV.
Details: 5044 N. West Avenue, Fresno. Hours: 11 a.m. to 11 p.m daily.
This story was originally published January 22, 2020 at 3:43 PM.
