NYC's Top Chicken Sandwiches, Part One
New reviews: Double Chicken Please, Mommy Pai's, Pecking House, Three Roosters, and elsewhere! Plus: Details on tonight's hot chicken specials at The Fly!
Hey Friends!
My fellow contributing critic Mahira Rivers and I just published our latest set of starred reviews for the New York Times! This week, we wrote about Le Chêne (fancy French), Santi (fancy Italian), Chalong (Southern Thai), and Kiko (an expensive tavern near the big Google campus). These were fun to write!
You can easily drop quite a few bucks at 75 percent of these spots (lol), so I thought it would be fun to keep things a little less pricey over at The Lo Times today.
Let’s get to it.
The (Affordable) State of Chicken Sandwiches!!!
One of the practical laws of menu pricing is that burgers are almost always cheaper than steaks. That’s a welcome reality given what type of advanced degree you’ll need to enjoy a dry-aged strip these days.
Just the same, your favorite chicken sandwich will usually cost less than an actual chicken, which is no small matter in an era when poultry can be, as Frank Bruni reported, the most expensive thing on any given menu.
Indeed, the affordability — and accessibility — of a chicken sandwich feels particularly refreshing right now.
You’re not going to stroll into a West Village restaurant and ask the bartender if they have a limited count McChicken, the way you know there are only a few wagyu trim burgers every night at your favorite cocktail bar. And no one is really uspcaling chicken sandwiches with truffles or caviar or whatever other obvious luxuries the chef is somehow really excited about.
A burger can easily hit $30 or more.
A chicken sandwich rarely costs too much more than $20.
Peak chicken sandwich arrived in the mid-2010s, when folks started queuing up for Chik-fil-A in Manhattan. Those aggressively saline sandwiches with pickles on the bottom (and a controversial corporate ethos) were still pretty new to the Big Apple lunchtime crowd back then.
And for a while, it seemed as if David Chang was going to start an entirely new empire with Fuku, a place to get shockingly delicious sandwiches that were spicy, fatty, and even a little gelatinous. Alas, breast meat has replaced the original dark-meat recipe, and that once promising chain is now confined to stadium concessions and sporting arenas in the Northeast (this press release states that the thigh meat sandwiches will still be available in New York).
But perhaps chicken sandwiches are starting to boom again in a big way?
Last summer, folks were waiting up to an hour for green chile-topped chicken sandwiches at Mommy Pai’s in Nolita. It was one of the year’s hottest openings!
This spring, the Ample Hills co-founders will try to strike out with smashburger-style chicken patties when they open Ramblin’ Chick in Gowanus, as the Strong Buzz reported. And just last week, I queued up in the cold at 4:45 p.m. for the chance to order a fried chicken mochi doughnut sandwich at DCP. I ate it next to some nice folks visiting from Ohio.
Further fueling the chicken boom, for sure, is the fact that poultry price inflation remains under control. Consumer chicken prices, while far from cheap, are up just 1.1 percent over the last year, compared with over 17 percent for ground beef.
This is when I tell you that most of the fried chicken sandwiches at DCP are actually cheaper than the cocktails there.
I suppose cocktail price inflation is a different story.
Seven Amazing Chicken Sandwiches!
Reviews of the chicken sandwiches at Double Chicken Please, Mommy Pai’s, Pecking House, Three Roosters, Bolivian Llama Party, and others. Plus, notes on tonight’s hot chicken specials at The Fly!