Howling Hot Chicken Brings Nashville Hot Chicken To Bridgeport

James Gribbon March 26, 2021

They call it a "slider," but it is not a slider. They call it "Hot Chicken," and it is definitely, exactly, most assuredly, guaranteed and board certified to be both of those things. Good lord. I have never been to Nashville, because I have never been a member of a southern lady's bachelorette party, but I have both been to Bridgeport, and Enjoyed-to-Tolerated many a chicken sandwich. If this is what they're like in central Tennessee, I may take the trip.

Howling Hot Chicken is just past the Bridgeport/Trumbull line down from the mall, and will shortly share a wall with a Milkcraft creamery, whose owners identified a bit of vacuum in the Connecticut landscape which needed filling with Extremely Hot Chicken (or mild, or simply fried with no spice, your call) and created a new franchise. Recognizing a similar void in my lunchtime, I recently swung by.

Pop through the doors and the first thing you notice is everyone behind the counter greets you, like you're walking into a Waffle House. Props for the bit of southern flair there. Inside, it's a standard fast-food setup, menu above the register, etc., and the space is airbrushed all over with bubbly, chicken-themed graffiti to go with Howling's stated "Urban. Hip. Hot." aesthetic. Duly noted, I promptly forgot all of that and focused on the task at hand: self-injury via weaponized sandwich.

Options are easy here: sliders and chicken tenders, with or without fries, and a few sides like macaroni salad and kale slaw. The range of levels goes like this: No Spice, Lite, Mild, Medium, Hot, Very Hot, and Reaper, which requires gloves, a glass of milk, and a signed waiver. I figure you come for the hot chicken, you get the Hot chicken. A number 3 combo comes with a slider, a tender, and fries. Wine and beer are coming soon (along with chicken and waffles), but I went with a 23oz. BFC tea and lemonade combo PeaceTea (*Coca-Cola) calls Caddyshack because that's the best name I've ever seen for an Arnold Palmer. The total came to $13.

Flip open the box and the smells of fresh fries and hot sauce burst forth. The lone tender is nested with pickles on a slice of potato bread, which I folded over in a sort of country-ass taco for my first bite.

The flavor rolls across your palate like a medieval siege engine. Half the neurons in your body spark at once. It is a mouth-trebuchet. My nose ran for the fire hoses, my tonsils evaporated, I may have gone temporarily blind, I don't remember. This was precisely what I came for. I smashed through the first course as fast as my vehemently protesting limbic system would allow. The pickles, by the way, are excellent.

Remember how I said the slider wasn't a slider? Well, it's not: it's a full-on sandwich twice the size of most fast-food burgers. The chicken (cage- and antibiotic-free, local farms, and so forth) was delicious on its own, and very well prepared: juicy, with a crisp, tight, batter layer holding all that sauce. Get over the initial shock, and the Hot sauce moderates out to a tasty, peppery flavor, complemented in the sandwich with a slight dressing of red cabbage slaw, those pickles, and a nicely toasted brioche bun branded with the Howling Hot Chicken logo. The slider is wrapped in paper in its own little box, which is good, because if you got this on your fingers and wiped your eye your head might explode. You will go through many napkins.

A little dipping cup of Howling's Comeback Sauce arrives with your combo, the aioli tasting (to my admittedly savaged tastebuds by then) a little of olives, and maybe a skotch funky - like a sibling of Zaxby's Zax Sauce. Anyway, it's good, and useful for dipping either the chicken or the crinkle cut fries, which were outstanding.

So the Hot chicken, to me, was the way to go. Like a perfectly browned steak, any more and the burning would have ruined it. I assume the Very Hot chicken wouldn't be something you "Eat," so much as "Do Battle With," and the Reaper is basically a phone-booth knife fight you have with yourself. Only you can decide where you fall on the Timidity-to-Masochism matrix. Test yourself, and be forged in fire.

Howling Hot Chicken, 4615 Main St., Bridgeport; https://howlinghotchicken.com; 203 540 5507