Royals Hot Chicken

Southern fried chicken in Louisville Kentucky, no Colonels, no bland mashed potatoes, just crazy good, hand made fresh authentic Southern Fried & Nashville Style Hot Chicken with Scratch Made Sides, 24 Craft Draft Beers, Champagne, and Milkshakes. Put your diet on hold, give your taste buds a pep talk and belly up to the bar for a serving of Gonzo, because this is Louisville.

Reviews:
Handcrafted Nashville hot chicken is doled out as tenders, sandwiches and tacos at this NuLu counter serve, also offering traditional Southern style sides like housemade coleslaw and baked pimento cheese, plus craft beers and boozy milkshakes. The airy, easygoing space features high top communal tables, white subway tiles, exposed-brick walls and a colorful chicken mural on the side of the building. – The Zagat Review

here is where Nashville hot chicken distinguishes itself from others. Once the chicken is pressure-fried, it’s tossed in a paste of oil and dried ground chiles that gives it a dense brown coating. That paste also is tailored to your preference for pepper-induced heat, ranging from mild to Gonzo, which, according to a diner seated next to me, delivered such a capsaicin-induced endorphin high, “It made me feel like I’d just smoked pot.”

I took his word for it and was glad I ordered mine two steps down at hot.

“Gonzo uses the three hottest peppers there are: Ghost, Carolina Reaper and Trinidad Scorpion,” he said. According to Rogers, each of those deliver more than 1 million Scoville heat units of palate-punishing burn. By comparison, cayenne peppers used in his hot choice register between 30,000 and 50,000 Scoville heat units. “But none of our heat levels is just one note. We blend them with other spices to create a lot of flavors.”
Since my Insider colleague Kevin Gibson will do a more detailed review of the food in January, I’ll say little more than I really liked it — chicken, sides and all.
And I love the community tables and the fast-casual set up, a trend Rogers acknowledged may be the smartest way to go in the modern-day restaurant industry. – Insider Louisville

Kentucky and fried chicken will be linked forever thanks to a white bearded, white-suited man who cooked up a zillion dollar secret. Recent news suggests the secret may be out of the bucket, but there’s no finger-lickin’ proof of that yet.

Some folks in Nashville tried one-upping our famous chicken when they came up with the idea of hot chicken. If you haven’t kept up with the chicken phenomenon that took a fast train out of Nashville and has set on fire palates all points north, south, east and west, know that hot refers to the spice level, not the temperature.

There are hot chicken loyalists in Louisville who have, dare I say, heated discussions over the merits of one hot chicken joint over another. Being on the fence allows you to continue testing and retesting which you prefer, amping up your tolerance for heat and sampling the variety of sides.
Recent outings to Royals Hot Chicken in NuLu weren’t enough to embolden me to order Gonzo, the hottest on the Mildness to Madness scale, reflective of the types of chiles used in the paste that creates the heat. I maxed out at Hot after having graduated from mild and medium. The Hot wasn’t an absolute killer heat and was modulated by other spices, but based on its flirting with the upfront-stated madness, I can’t imagine that X-Hot and Gonzo are anything other than sadomasochistic heat. Hey, I’m not judging what you might like, only warning you. – Courier Journal

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