Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack is a cultural icon in Nashville’s Black community. The restaurant has survived changes in location, poor attempts at copycatting their recipes, and even family woes. But there’s something that continues to threaten this business.
Of course, Prince’s knows all about threats. After all, the spice recipe is allegedly the result of a wife being sick of her man’s cheating ways!
Still, the effects of this threat are thrown in the owners’ faces with every chain restaurant’s hot chicken commercial and every hipster who claims to be an expert on hot chicken.
Once white people, seeking to make a quick buck, heard about hot chicken, they developed substandard knockoffs and got financing to make their unseasoned businesses viable. Even big restaurant chains like KFC hopped on the hot chicken bandwagon!
Black businesses, on the other hand, continue to struggle to get financing, find backers, and sustain themselves. It’s the same story all the time – our ideas and culture are frequently stolen, but rarely supported the same way as other businesses. We can fix that, however. How?
We must know WHO is behind the machine of a business so that we can support our people and not those exploiting our traditions and culture. Seeking out the original, Black-owned originators is a difficult, but delicious challenge. Bon appetit!