Can a Chicken Finger Ever Be Fancy?

Do not ever forget the sauce. Art: Noah Verrier

Stephane Lemagnen was born in France and has mostly worked in high-caliber, Michelin-baiting restaurants before he was asked to take over a family member’s struggling Belgian frites shop on the Lower East Side. He agreed, but to grow the menu with the equipment he already had on hand, he came up with a roster of chicken sandwiches and tenders plus sauces like jalapeño ranch and truffle mayo. He named it 375 Chicken ’N Fries — the temperature of the frying oil — and, with its carryout-first model devoted to the easiest of comfort foods, was better poised than most places for success during the pandemic, which arrived a year after the shop debuted. Lemagnen now has three new locations set to open this month, in the Meatpacking District, Harlem, and Bed-Stuy, joining the half-dozen outposts that already exist. “I cannot say there was a master plan behind it all,” Lemagnen admits, but he’s willing to attribute his early success to one factor that was completely outside his control: the arrival of the Popeyes chicken sandwich way back in 2019. “It blew up,” he says, “and suddenly people started paying attention to fried chicken in a different way.”

That fast-food sandwich was, others say, an inflection point for breaded and fried hunks of boneless chicken breast. Its success also inspired Deja Bond, who had recently gotten a master’s in data science from NYU, but was duly inspired to open her own business, Filly Luv, in Bed-Stuy. “Everybody went crazy over the sandwich,” she says. “I was like, I’m going to create chicken that is juicy, crispy, and flaky, and it has to have the perfect sauce for them for every type of mood.” For Filly Luv’s sandwiches, tenders, and nuggets, Bond brines whole chicken breasts for 24 hours before cutting them down to size. One of Bond’s most popular items is the Luv Child, a flour-tortilla-wrapped chicken tender with cheese, lettuce, and ranch — an ode to the discontinued McDonald’s snack wrap.

Bond is not alone in her attempts to both capitalize on and improve upon the country’s never-ending love affair with chicken tenders, chicken fingers, popcorn-chicken bites, or any other permutation of the technique that was first devised as a means of dealing with the dangling muscle between the chicken’s breast and rib cage. New York City has never been immune to the charms of this most Middle America of foods — tenders have been a staple across slice shops and halal spots alike — but the exploding growth of chains like Raising Cane’s and Dave’s Hot Chicken in addition to hometown purveyors such as Schnipper’s, Bobwhite Counter, Sticky’s Finger Joint, and Fields Good Chicken has brought tenders to nearly every block.

The city’s endless appetite for sly nods to suburban cuisine and nostalgic childhood flavors has similarly inspired fine-dining chefs to try their hands at the ever-fraught gamble of “elevating” this basic template: Curry-flavored chunks are served with green-chile mayo at Ariari on First Avenue, while the Dhamaka team’s chicken offshoot Rowdy Rooster offers choose-your-own-spice-level tenders accompanied by mint chutney. And it’s possible no dish has received more press attention this year than Coqodaq’s caviar-topped Golden Nuggets, which are tenders in spirit. Of course, actual tenders — coated with corn flakes — can be optionally topped off with a $37 helping of caviar at Rocco’s, a nouveau sports bar deep in the heart of NYU country.

If the idea of caviar-topped chicken tenders strikes you as a little too … Vegas, you aren’t far off. That’s the city where a chain in the making called Tender Crush first launched. It comes from the people behind Black Tap’s burger and gonzo Instagram milkshakes and applies the same let’s-upgrade-it sensibility to the humble chicken finger that made their original business such a success. (They got the idea for the new expansion after Black Tap’s chicken sandwich with Korean barbecue sauce and slaw became one of that chain’s best sellers.) In fact, Black Tap’s executive chef, Stephen Parker, once worked at Popeyes and has put that experience to use at Tender Crush, which this fall opened its second location, in Soho: “If you really want a good chicken tender or chicken finger, it’s important to use the tenderloin,” he explains. “It’s really important to us.”

Parker starts with tenderloins that weigh about four ounces each before they’re cut in half to achieve the chef’s ideal strip size. His kitchen staff brines everything directly in batter before a pre-fry dredge in different starches to help their chicken achieve as much crunch as possible without drying out the meat or overloading on salt. Parker also realizes that the most important part of any chicken-finger experience is the condiments. Tender Crush has options like a bright-red bird-pepper dip made from an assertive blend of chile oil and fermented peppers with “Jackson Heights heat” and a dried-kimchee sprinkle in a shaker on the counter. Most of the menu, meanwhile, is dedicated to tenders already tossed and garnished, like the Harlem Hot, which is the team’s take on buffalo sauce with blue cheese.

Despite the New York–centric menu names, Parker’s ultimate goal is nothing short of global conquest. “We have international partners from Dubai to London, to Switzerland, to Malaysia and Singapore,” he says. “Our idea is to scale this brand and bring it wherever.” Yet even on the global stage, competition is fierce. Lemagnen’s 375 Chicken chain opened its first location in Qatar in September 2019. An outpost in Oman followed two years later.