The eponymous Dave of Dave's Hot Chicken trained under Chef Thomas Keller...so maybe our expectations were too high going in? We need to talk about the cheese fries. In Tasting Table's roundup of the Dave's Hot Chicken menu items to order and the ones to skip completely, we wrote the chain's cheese fries off as a skip. However, in our ranking of the 10 best restaurant cheese fries, we gave Dave's cheese fries the illustrious number two spot out of 10 (surpassed only by Wingstop). Why do the results of our taste-tests vary so drastically? After some soul (and stomach, and internet) searching, the answer seems to be that Dave's cheese fries vary pretty drastically, too.
The explosion of Dave's Hot Chicken will continue in Pinole on Friday, as the franchise opens its 387th store its 20th in the Bay Area. Gregg Fleury, owner of the Pinole location, opened his first Dave's franchise four years ago, and it was store No. 22. Now, we're No. 387, he said. It is insane, the growth of this concept. Dave's began in 2017 with a parking lot pop-up in East Hollywood.
With over 300 locations in America, Dave's Hot Chicken sells its namesake dish - Southern-style fried chicken tossed in various spicy sauces - as well as milkshakes, fries, and chicken sliders. In an official press release, Yelp revealed that 71% of user reviews for Dave's Hot Chicken locations ranked the brand at four or five stars.
If you're not familiar with Nashville hot chicken, you might wonder: What's the big deal about spicy chicken? Well, while buffalo-style has largely dominated the spicy chicken market in the U.S. for longer than any of us can remember, there's a new fiery, Nashville-born bird in town. And we have Dave's Hot Chicken to thank, in part, for its surge in popularity.