Nashville Hot Chicken Comes to Cambridge, Mass.
Nashville Hot Chicken Comes to Cambridge, Mass.
Alex Kim (SHA’16) brings a popular Southern dish to the Northeast
While a student at SHA, Los Angeles native Alex Kim saw a hole in Boston’s restaurant scene. “Boston hasn’t gotten this reputation as a diverse eating city like some other major cities,” he says. “But I think there’s a lot of potential here.” Kim (SHA’16) decided to stick around after graduating and explore that potential. He attended the Hyatt Hotels food and beverage corporate management training program, and went on to become an assistant manager for the Boston-area vegetarian chain Clover Food Lab and general manager of the fast casual seafood restaurant Eventide Fenway—a role he had at the height of the pandemic. “Those were the most difficult years of my career, but I learned so much. It was trial by several fires. I can’t sugarcoat that.”
In 2019, he started to make plans to launch his own restaurant. Three years later, he opened Hot Chix, a restaurant serving Nashville hot chicken, in Cambridge’s Inman Square, with his two partners, Will Yoo and Alex Nystedt. Nashvillestyle hot chicken, which is said to have originated at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, is buttermilk-brined, coated in seasoned flour, and dipped in a fiery cayenne-forward sauce.
Kim spoke with Bostonia about the challenges of opening a restaurant and how they developed their recipe.
Q&A
with Alex Kim
Bostonia: Let’s talk about Hot Chix. How did you get involved with the concept?
Kim: We officially became a business in 2019, before the pandemic. Will was the one who had the idea to bring Nashville-style hot chicken to Boston. It didn’t exist here back then. I think some of it was influenced by the fact that I’m from LA, and LA had a hot chicken craze for a long time. Alex was one of my mentors when I was in college. He was with Barbara Lynch’s group and their restaurant Sportello at the time. My other partner, Will, has been in the franchise game. We all bring a little bit of a different perspective on how an independent restaurant should be run.
We did pop-ups first, and we were about to sign a lease, and then COVID hit. We ended up not signing that lease—luckily, I think. We continued pop-ups, being residents at different friends’ restaurant including Idle Hour in Quincy and PAGU in Cambridge. They opened their doors to us to let us cook and make money and be able to sustain ourselves through the pandemic. [The success of these pop-ups] instilled a new confidence in us that we should make this concept a brick and mortar. I think Hot Chix is definitely a very polarizing brand for a lot of people. But we kind of like that.
Bostonia: Polarizing how?
Kim: In a few ways. Part of it is that we’re three Korean dudes serving hot fried chicken—which originated in Southern Black communities—in Massachusetts. The other part of it is the name—people think of it as demeaning, but it’s just how we abbreviate chicken in the kitchen. I find that kind of funny, and I think it attests to what we believe restaurants should and can be—they should be fun.
Bostonia: What went into developing the chicken recipe?
It involved a very long trip to Tennessee to eat a lot of hot chicken and a lot of testing. We met the owner of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, which is touted as the original hot chicken restaurant. She had a lot of good words for us and was happy that we were doing something like this up north. Development started in Will’s home kitchen using a Dutch oven as a frying vessel.
Bostonia: You’ve only recently opened, but have there been any challenges you’ve faced so far?
This is probably across the board in the industry, but labor is the number one issue. Restaurants are tough places to work. The other thing I am worried about is how people are eating now. What is their expectation when they go into a restaurant? We’re not super fine dining, but we’re not like McDonald’s either. When you’re in that middle ground, it’s kind of hard to meet everybody’s expectations. Those are the things that we’re pondering as we work on Hot Chix 1.2, 1.3, 1.4. This is the most challenging thing that I’ve done as an operator, but also the most exciting because the slate seems clear to experiment.
Bostonia: What’s the go-to Hot Chix order?
Get a tender plate, hot, and get an order of the biscuits. Make chicken biscuits and supplement with pickles and slaw.
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