This Fried Chicken Has a Waitlist—and a Secret

Over the past year, there was a single critical question many restaurant owners were forced to ask themselves, often for the first time: Will this food travel well? As the pandemic forced dining rooms to shut down, even the most high-end of restaurants became exclusively takeout and delivery operations. But when lockdown delayed plans, he instead found a new calling slinging fried chicken (takeout and to-go only) out of his uncle’s Flushing Chinese restaurant, Peking House.

It has become one of the most sought-after restaurants to open in the past year. Huang’s fried chicken marries the shatteringly crisp, Chinese five-spice-laced character of a Taiwanese fried chicken with the saucy, spicy, glazed goodness of a Nashville hot chicken.

Fried chicken, while glistening and crunchy straight of the fryer, quickly turns soggy in transit—as anybody who has frowned after popping the top off a KFC or Popeyes takeout box can attest. In most fried foods, as the protein releases its moisture after being fried, the gluten in the flour absorbs it, eventually causing the crust to become soggy.

In addition, in the manufacturing process for EverCrisp, the gluten is removed. It’s one of the more specific styles of fried chicken to land in the city, and the response to Huang’s crisp-for-hours fried chicken has been profuse—Pecking House right now has a list of more than 6,000 people waiting for the opportunity to try this culinary marvel. Huang, who is Taiwanese American and was raised in New York, grew up on Popeyes and Kentucky Fried Chicken, but he didn’t learn to fry chicken until he went to the Culinary Institute of America in his mid-twenties.

While a classic Southern-style preparation will instruct you to brine the chicken in buttermilk. Then dip it in flour (which can be “a messy, miserable process,” Huang states), he learned instead to use a unique paste of buttermilk, all-purpose flour, Dijon mustard, and seasonings to form a crust on the raw, seasoned chicken. Huang theorizes that this process results in a crust that better sticks to the chicken, by hydrating the flour. Therefore creating a “uniform, durable substrate for dry starches to adhere to when fried,” he states. In his version at Pecking House, he adds a Nashville-inspired touch by mixing duck fat with a proprietary blend of spicy seasonings to lacquer the finished chicken.

But the single key element to the buttermilk paste, which as well includes Chinese five spice powder, is, of course, the EverCrisp. When he was developing his fried chicken, he ordered some EverCrisp and tested out replacing 20 percent of the flour in his dredging mixture with EverCrisp. The results spoke for themselves. “People pick it up in Queens and drive it to Connecticut, and it is still crispy,” Huang says of his fried chicken.

He theorizes that 20 percent is “the sweet spot” where the EverCrisp keeps the food crispy for longer without giving the chicken a “cakey and gummy” crust. The chicken is also transported in boxes that have ridges on the bottom to create air circulation. You can make fried chicken to bring to a picnic, and EverCrisp is insurance that it’ll stay crunchy.

Huang is now looking at spaces in New York City for a brick-and-mortar restaurant that will (unsurprisingly) focus on fried chicken. Even if diners at his new spot may not be transporting the chicken across state lines, he still plans on using EverCrisp in every order, “for the possibility that someone brings [fried chicken] home,” he explains. “For the 10 percent of people that eat it later that night and find it still crispy, that is a moment worth delivering.” RECIPE: Forever Crispy Fried Chicken