The Great Nashville Hot Chicken Exploration

Located next to a discount tire store and a gas station whose many cases are filled mostly with high-volume beer containers, our third stop on the exploration is 400 Degrees Soul Food and More. Arriving at around 7:00 P.M., we enter 400 Degrees to find ourselves the only people inside the restaurant. While waiting, one of the cooks mentioned to us that it might be smart to call-in our order next time.

Call-in? Do we look like call-in people? We want to take in the entire process not just a measly five minutes waiting in the lobby. Maybe when the exploration has ended and we’re a pack of seasoned chicken veterans we’ll call it in. Until then, look out restaurants! We’re a mob of hungry men bound for your lobby or dining area to loiter until our hot chicken is ready.

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Back on the chicken note, I am sorry to say that there isn’t much positive to say about the 400 Degrees experience.

Shown above is a sample of the “400 Degree” chicken–the hottest you can order it. Please note the rich color but odd sort of liquidy smooth texture. The video below says it all. To summarize, 400 Degrees’ chicken is a lot of heat shrouding an odd combination of flavors (that do not sum to something enjoyable) shrouding some run-of-the-mill chicken. Perhaps our review is skewed after having tried both Prince’s and Bolton’s hot chicken, both of which are preeminent in the Nashville scene, but not one of us attempting 400 Degrees’ felt it was on par with what we have found elsewhere.

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Mysterious, the only one of us to try the “200 Degree” chicken found it to be decent, which leads me to believe that the “400 Degree” chicken is just a double-dipped version of the “200 Degree,” an extra step that perhaps adds more heat but definitely not more flavor. While one may say that having a heat-level that is redeeming is good for 400 Degrees as a restaurant, I am inclined to believe that if you run a hot chicken establishment and your hottest chicken is not also your best chicken, then you should reevaluate your priorities. Then again, I am one of this crazy lot out to burn numb our taste buds and punish our digestive systems with the most caustic poultry available.

You’ll see here how the wet-sand-like spicy coating rubs off on the bread. Unlike Prince’s whose bread soaks up the extra grease and spicy run-off from the chicken, the 400 Degrees’ bread is more like a mat or wipe scraping off the excess. While not completely awful tasting, I feel I must report that the exterior of the chicken had a flavor that was, to me, not unlike the smell of a hamster cage. Edible, but curious.

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