Dave’s Hot Chicken turns up the heat in Queen City’s tender battle
Patrons wait in line to order food during a “friends and family” event at Dave’s Hot Chicken in Manchester, which opened to the public Jan. 25. (Mike Cote/NH Business Review) Now that the New Hampshire primary is over and the national media has moved on to South Carolina, we can return our attention to another slugfest.
The chicken tender battle. Dave’s Hot Chicken, a trendy chain whose investors include the rapper, Drake, opened Jan. 25 in Manchester, serving fried chicken sandwiches and chicken tenders on a retail strip already saturated with fast-food joints.
Co-founder Arman Oganesyan announced in 2021 that Drake had joined as a major investor. Since Dave’s Hot Chicken first emerged as a pop-up restaurant in 2017, the company has opened more than 100 locations, including one in Portsmouth and two in the Boston area.
The Manchester location has been home to a succession of national and regional chain concepts over the past 20 years:
Chili’s, the British Beer Company and, most recently, the Flight Center. Dave’s Hot Chicken is the first to focus on fast food served from the counter.
Dave’s Hot Chicken already faces neighborhood competition from Popeyes, which replaced a Pizza Hut on South Willow in 2020, and soon will face off with yet another chicken restaurant concept, Raising Cane’s, a Louisiana chain that specializes in chicken tenders. That company plans to build a 3,200-square-foot fast-food restaurant with two drive-thru lanes at the former location of CJ’s Great West Grill, as reported last year by Jonathan Phelps in the New Hampshire Union Leader.
In December, Great New Hampshire Restaurants CEO Tom Boucher said his company, which operated CJ’s and its predecessor, Cactus Jack’s, at 782 South Willow St. for nearly three decades, accepted an offer to terminate their lease and plan to revive the CJ’s brand at another location.
Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger King on South Willow also hawk fried chicken.
As for the rest of the Queen City, find me a single neighborhood where you can’t find a restaurant within a few blocks of your house that serves handbreaded chicken tenders.
Remember, this is the city where chicken tenders were invented 50 years ago at the Puritan Backroom Restaurant.
How hot is too hot?
Dave’s Hot Chicken is not kidding about the hot part: Its hottest flavor, the Reaper, is an adults-only menu item and requires patrons to sign a waiver that absolves the company of liability and acknowledges such potential risk as “bodily injury, property damage, emotional distress or even death.”
I signed the waiver during a private “friends and family” event the day before the restaurant opened. It read like a mix of a legalese and cheeky marketing. Every reference to REAPER is printed in uppercase letters and includes a trademark icon, not the kind of language you would expect to be used to hold a corporation harmless.
That said, don’t try the Reaper unless you enjoy testing the limits of your taste buds and digestive tract. Having a fair amount of experience with hot peppers, I danced with the Reaper on a lark, cutting off a small piece of chicken with a plastic knife and fork.
If you’ve ever been foolish enough to try the hottest flavor at Buffalo Wild Wings, this one is even hotter than that. After tempering the heat with a few sips of a chocolate milkshake, I experimented by pulling off the breading to see if the pepper had penetrated the meat. Yes, it did. Fear the REAPER.
For my chicken tender slider, which was garnished with kale slaw, I chose the “hot” level, a couple of rungs below the Reaper. I’m not a good judge of how spicy the slider was because by comparison it was as mild as mashed potatoes, but I will confirm that it was tasty.
New Hampshire’s ‘Hot 200’
One of my favorite pastimes growing up was to check out the Billboard 200 album chart, which I could read for free thanks to the library at Parkside Junior High in Manchester, which subscribed to the music industry trade magazine.
The lineup of the national sales chart changed every week, though some bestsellers like Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and Carole King’s “Tapestry” enjoyed long runs that lasted for years.
The first two editions of our “New Hampshire 200” book, which spotlights the Granite State’s most influential business leaders, had a fair amount of overlap. For our upcoming third edition, we decided to create an entirely new list of 200, with help from past honorees.
We’ll be celebrating the publication of the “2024 New Hampshire 200” on April 11 at the Grappone Conference Center in Concord. As of press time, about 375 people had already registered for the networking event.
Don’t miss it. We expect it will be a hot one.
Mike Cote is editor for NH Business Review and New Hampshire Magazine.
