Let’s start with an idea. It’s a simple one. Let’s float the notion that what Americans embrace as the most American of foods invariably find their respective origins in the wildly and most disparately un-American of culinary antecedents. Take the all-American hot dog: references to meat-in-tube-form abound in Homer’s Odyssey (that’s 9th Century B.C. Greece for you kids keeping score at home), though most food historians cite Frankfurter, Germany, 1487, as the birthplace of our own dirty water dog’s first proud progenitor. As for the mighty and ever-ubiquitous American hamburger: Romans enjoyed patties of spiced, ground meat called isicia omentata, though it’s 19th century cousin, the Hamburg steak, hailing from the eponymous port city in Germany, and which now gives its name to the pucks of ground beef that Americans consume, on average, at the rate of 222 pounds per year. That’s the equivalent of 800 burgers per person, per year.
So if we then follow this path of bivalent logic to the sunny, blue-skied clearing of its inevitable truth—that the Americanness of our most national foods are inversely proportional to ratio of their identity as “American” when juxtaposed to its pedigree in extraterritorial otherness—then I would suggest that fried chicken is this country’s most American of dishes. That’s right, folks: yard bird is even more American than apple pie and Chevrolet.
Because unlike the hot dog and the hamburger, the origins of fried chicken are hotly in dispute. One school of food historian will have you believe that fried chicken was first developed in west Africa, where it was battered and seasoned, then fried in palm oil for maximum deliciousness. Another faction of culinary historian argues, however, that fried chicken was invented by the Scots, who later shared their chicken fried-in-fat technique with populations of enslaved west Africans across the antebellum American South. No matter which camp in this great chicken debate stands on the right side of history (though I, for one, believe fried chicken is a uniquely African culinary invention), what’s not in dispute is fried chicken’s extraordinary yin-yang function within American foodways, simultaneously expressing both the historical ugliness of American racial hostility and stereotypes associated with the dish, while also functioning as a force of good by playing the part of great American culinary cross-pollinator and unifier, enriching the quotidian cuisine of any ethnicity—black, white, Korean—willing to gather under the mighty banner of its eminence. A most American dish through and through.
And despite the seemingly impenetrable fog of history surrounding fried chicken’s inception, there is one thing I know with absolute certainty: fried chicken is my favorite food. Like, ever. My death row meal. My desert island dish. For this eater, no other food comes close in besting fried chicken in succulence and savor, and I will seek it out no matter how difficult proves its procurance or how sketchy seems its source. Which brings me to Brown’s Fried Chicken, easily among the most ethereal—if unlikely—of fried chicken experiences in a lifetime spent as an ardent devotee in constant pursuit of the stuff. Because Brown’s Fried Chicken is located inside a gas station, set in a somnolent, out-of-the-way corner of Charlottesville, Virginia. And because my encounter with its greatness—like so many of life’s truly great meals—was entirely accidental.
To wit: my teenage daughter was hungry. I needed gas. We had just spent the morning at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and needed fuel for body and machine before making the two-hour return trip to our home in Washington, D.C. So we left the third president’s hilltop estate and drove around residential Charlottesville, slowly, aimlessly, without any real idea of destination, until we saw it: a yard sign shoved in fallow, late-winter grass, the kind of sign nascent relators use, which advertised a free piece of fried chicken for every ten-gallons of gas. I looked at my daughter and smiled. She rolled her eyes, a gesture of teenage acquiescence if ever there was one.
We parked and went in. What we discovered inside Brown’s was a high temple of gastronomy posing as an everyday gas station, stocked with the obligatory Slim Jim’s and Yoohoo and bags of commercial pork rinds, but smelling, just under the whiff of diesel, like my mother’s very own rural Missouri kitchen on days she would fry chicken. It was magic. Behind the counter the day of our visit was none other than the proprietor himself, Mike Brown, or as I had yet to formally meet Mr. Brown, an effusively friendly man of robust middle age, who happily rang us up for two bottles of Cheerwine and a single, five-piece box. After receiving our food and a promise from Mr. Brown that our chicken would no doubt please, my daughter and I returned to the front seat of our car to eat (Brown’s is takeaway only; seating is available in the comfort of your own vehicle, should you choose). So eat we did. We went at our food like the famished and underfed, wordlessly gnashing at our chicken until the thigh bones rang against our teeth like castanets. With the chicken quickly dispatched, we looked over at each other, father and daughter, dazed and full of chicken-fried wonder, scarcely able to comprehend the deliciousness of what we had just eaten.
We were also slathered in chicken grease. Our faces glistened with the stuff.
So we went back in. We returned to Brown’s and asked the attending fry-cook to speak with Mr. Brown so we might praise his mind-bendingly wonderful chicken in person. But we were kindly informed that Mr. Brown was now elsewhere in the building, attending to other business. Crestfallen, we asked instead for a restroom in which to wash our hands. The cook informed us Brown’s had no public restroom, but after reading the pleading look on my daughter’s face, offered us use of the handwashing station in Brown’s kitchen.
Even as an industry professional twenty years in, it’s always a bit strange to first enter the kitchen of a fellow cook whom you’ve only just met, with the ticket of admittance being as much about trust and professional intimacy as any transactional traffic or dietary concern. But we were invited, so enter we did. We walked through a lone swinging door and found the sink. And as my daughter scrubbed away, I crept around Mr. Brown’s kitchen, peering into the fry grease, then bending to nose the flour-and-spice mix, all with the kind of open-mouthed awe a visitor to Oz might evince upon first peering behind the curtain. This place, I thought, this is where the magic happens.
It was also the place that Mr. and Mrs. Brown suddenly reappeared to find my daughter and me in their kitchen, still wet to the elbows with soapy water, looking very much like two people caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar of culinary secrets. We looked guilty. Or I did, at least. The flour on the tip on my nose was a dead giveaway. Mr. Brown said nothing. He didn’t have to. The expression on his face said it all: I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for you being in my kitchen with my flour on your face.
I smiled and laughed and tried to play it cool. But then I blew it. Big time. Because I let my own curiosity get the best of me. I asked Mr. Brown if it was Old Bay I had just tasted, secreted somewhere deep inside the crust of his chicken, that so beautifully imparted an extraordinary depth of flavor in the skin, and an almost miraculous umami pop inside the meat. Mr. Brown looked at me, then looked at the mound of his secret spice rub just behind me, then back at me again as if were a dimwitted child who had just stuck his finger in wall socket for fun. A look crossed Mr. Brown’s face much the way a sudden cloud will pass across the face of the moon. He shook his head and held open the kitchen door as if to invite my daughter and me to take our leave. But when, in a last, desperate, Hail Mary attempt to stave off eviction, I asked Mr. Brown about how he had come to be in the business of frying chicken, Mr. Brown seemed to brighten. He grinned and let go of the door and began to speak in a low, sonorous voice full of the kind of music you hear only in the South. A sotto voce of pure beauty.
This is what he said:
“We started Brown’s on April 4, 1984 is Esmont, Virginia, about twenty minutes south of Charlottesville. We started selling chicken sandwiches, which my father pan-fried in the store. The sandwiches were a hit. So in 1989, we remodeled the Esmont store and installed a new system that allowed us to fry chicken in bulk. We began to sell meals and chicken dinners in larger quantities and build a credible reputation until we sold that location in 2006.”
Warming to his subject, Mr. Brown continued:
“In early 2011—I think it was the month of April again—we got the opportunity to purchase this 1218 Avon Street location, where we are currently taking fried chicken and trying to build gas volume. About a year and a half ago, we started giving a free piece of chicken with a fill up. If a customer fillers his or her vehicle with a ten-gallon gas minimum, they get a free piece of chicken of his or her choice. To our knowledge, we don’t think anyone has ever done anything like that. Once we do some renovations, we plan to advertise on TV and radio and get church groups and schools involved.”
At this point, Mr. Brown grew almost wistful:
“Kim and I can’t cook each and every piece of chicken, nor can we serve each and every customer, but we hope and pray our employees take as much pride as we do when we’re present. We are a Christian organization and try to lead by example in greeting, thanking, and treating all of our customers with respect, which is much more important than anything else we do.”
Having spent my entire food career in an industry run on cynicism and fueled by snark, I hardly knew how to respond. I was dumbfounded. I was nonplussed. Witnessing Mike Brown’s heart-felt earnestness was, for me, like staring into the sun. I blinked dumbly, dazedly, at Mr. Brown, who seemed to understand. He looked at me and nodded as if in benediction. We shook hands then, the Browns with my daughter and me, and said our goodbyes.
My daughter and I spoke very little on the ride home. It wasn’t as if we had nothing to say. Neither of us spoke because neither of us wanted to break the spell. Something had happened to us in Charlottesville. Something special. Between father and daughter. Between the Browns and us. Was it the miraculous fried chicken? Was it our conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Brown? Or was it the palpable inscrutability of their kitchen and the culinary magic therein? If either of us knew the answer, neither of us gave it voice. Instead, we rode on silently with the smell of fried chicken still heavy in the car, with greasy paper napkins still on the floorboards yet around our feet, and with the absolute certainty between us that we’d return to Brown’s one day soon for a few gallons of gas and their wondrous fried chicken.
Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Your food is exquisite, and you both are clearly on the side of the angels.
Go there, people. Tell the Browns I sent you. And please, whatever you do, order the five-piece box.
