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On any given night, as Elias Taddesse watched plate after plate of steak tartare roulade sail out of the kitchen at Caviar Russe in New York City, frying chicken and flipping burgers could not have been further from his mind. Taddesse always wanted to own a restaurant. His entrepreneurial vision was informed by the classical techniques and soigné styles of Alain Ducasse and Paul Liebrandt — two legendary French chefs, and two of his former bosses.
But the pandemic forced Taddesse to pivot away from fine dining and toward something more casual and comforting: fried chicken. Now, at Doro Soul Food, the scrappy takeout counter in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood where Taddesse is frying up cuts of craggy, spicy, bone-in chicken, toques and tournées are a distant memory.
Taddesse is one of a handful of former fine-dining chefs finding success and a renewed sense of purpose by striking out alone to sell fried chicken with a personal spin.
Doro Soul Food is Taddesse’s second casual endeavor following Mélange, a sit-down burger restaurant on K Street NW that opened in 2020, in the midst of the D.C. pandemic response that severely limited business operations. With money on the line, he rewrote the menu for takeout, adding a fried chicken sandwich spiced like doro wat, the classic Ethiopian chicken stew. It quickly became a top seller, which convinced Taddesse to open Doro Soul Food, a takeout-only fast-casual counter. Mélange closed earlier this month, leaving Taddesse to focus on Doro Soul Food, where American soul food meets the Ethiopian diaspora in the form of country fried chicken in three levels of spice — naked, berbere and mit mita (made with bird’s eye chile).
Mélange, though now closed, led to Doro Soul Food, and for Taddesse, it was a pandemic pivot that saved his dreams of going solo. “That’s how my launch survived,” he says.
Eric Huang similarly worked at prestigious kitchens in Manhattan. In early 2020, Huang quit his job at Eleven Madison Park to open his own fine-dining restaurant. When the pandemic shut down restaurants across New York City a few months later, Huang set aside his plans. He started a ghost kitchen in Queens called Pecking House based on five-spice-seasoned fried chicken generously basted with Tianjin chile oil — ingredients in his family’s Chinese restaurant pantry.
The skin-on chicken, sourced from D’Artagnan, has an especially dark crust, but a touch of sugar balances out the bitter, fiery heat. At its peak, Huang’s chile-fried chicken had a waiting list of more than 9,000 people.
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A fine-dining chef entering the fried chicken chat is nothing new. After all, consistency is a virtue extolled as much in fine dining as it is in fast food. Thomas Keller opened Ad Hoc in Napa in 2006 with a famous fried chicken dinner. David Chang’s growing chicken sandwich chain, Fuku, opened in 2015.
But for chefs like Taddesse and Huang, who were looking to salvage a business or just keep themselves busy in a difficult time, fried chicken was a knee-jerk solution to the daily dilemma of how to feed yourself in a pandemic. Their quick thinking was fortuitous; amid all that turmoil, fried chicken was the ultimate comfort food.
“It’s a perfect food for your omnivorous human. It just hits every dopamine center in your brain,” Huang says.
According to a 2023 chain restaurant report from research and consulting firm Technomic, fast-casual chicken chains have grown faster than any other restaurant segment since 2019. That happens to be the year of the infamous chicken sandwich “wars,” which Popeyes initiated by introducing its first fried chicken sandwich, leading to a national frenzy.
David Portalatin, the vice president and food industry adviser at Circana (formerly NPD and IRI, which recently merged), estimates that Americans eat about 8.6 billion servings of fried chicken in restaurants annually, a figure that includes everything from bone-in birds to nuggets. “The American consumer absolutely loves fried chicken,” Portalatin says.
It’s easy to forget, but chefs are consumers, too. Cyle Reynolds recalls frequently going out to eat Thai-style fried chicken after his shift at Canvas, a fine-dining restaurant in Bangkok that he helped open in 2016. In Maine a few years later, when his plan to sign a restaurant lease fell through — on March 30, 2020, no less — Reynolds turned to happier memories of fried chicken. He now runs a Thai-style fried chicken restaurant called Crispy Gai in downtown Portland, Maine, with two business partners.
Reynolds’s decision to embrace a more approachable cuisine — as opposed to perfectly seared duck breasts and a multicourse tasting menu at Canvas — simplified his job in some ways. “Fine dining has to be thought-provoking, it has to be aesthetically beautiful, it has so many requirements,” Reynolds says. His fried chicken, on the other hand, has just one obligation: “that it be delicious.” The chicken at Crispy Gai is reminiscent of Reynolds’s favored Thai street food, brined in a pungent fish sauce and cilantro marinade before it is fried twice, then garnished with sweet fried shallots.
Fried chicken’s popularity has proved to be a solid foundation on which to build a business. “Lots of cultures have been doing this for years,” says Psyche Williams-Forson, the author of “Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs,” a book that illuminates the legacy of selling fried chicken as a means of self-determination among formerly enslaved Black women.
When the business of making and selling fried chicken has been replicated for more than a century, as it has in America, what else is there to do? Riff. “It’s really smart to say, ‘Let’s use something that people already are familiar with and put our own spin on it,’” says Williams-Forson.
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In addition to providing a blank canvas for a chef’s creativity, fried chicken can also be a vehicle for something more compelling, like telling a personal story or challenging the status quo.
For Taddesse, after years of cooking someone else’s food, here was an opportunity to represent his own. “I’m from Ethiopia. I can’t be cooking French food for the rest of my career,” he says. With Doro Soul Food, Taddesse can champion the complexities of Ethiopian cuisine, something he feels is underappreciated in America. “To familiarize it through fried chicken,” he says.
Before Pecking House, Huang hoped to open a fine-dining restaurant that would treat Chinese cooking with the same reverence, and charge the same high prices, as other cuisines. “I wanted to open a modern fine-dining restaurant that would change how everyone looked at Chinese cuisine,” he says. But even at his quick-service restaurant in Brooklyn, he is challenging assumptions that certain foods — fried chicken or Chinese food — have to be cheap. Huang sources premium whole, air-chilled chicken from D’Artagnan while keeping costs in line, something he learned to do at fine-dining restaurants.
At a time when fine dining is coming under increased scrutiny for unethical labor practices and unsustainable standards, for some, time away from high-pressure kitchens has led to a complete reevaluation of the format. “Fine dining made us really good at what we do, but that comes with a pretty hefty price tag,” says Huang, who often posts criticisms of the industry online.
Reynolds says he, too, benefited from the intense structure of a high-end kitchen, but at Crispy Gai, he prefers to cultivate the kind of communal, convivial atmosphere that he became enamored with in Thailand. “I love having a restaurant that people enjoy working in. When I come in and see smiling faces, it puts a smile on my face, and that gives me a lot of pride,” he says.
And yet, selling fried chicken in paper boats and to-go containers is no sacrifice. “We do what we do with very high standards; we just do it with a lot less pretension,” says Reynolds.
Taddesse still hopes to one day open a fine-dining Ethiopian restaurant in D.C. Until then, he’ll make do with a sliding scale of spicy fried chicken and sides that pay homage to Popeyes, his preferred chicken chain. The velvety mashed potatoes are, in fact, made from a recipe for classic pommes puree. “Of course,” he says, “with a little less butter than I would use for fine dining.”
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