By Chef Alexis Hernandez
Some dishes start long before they become restaurant food
Some dishes start long before they become restaurant food. This fried chicken salad started long before it ever became a menu item.
I started making it at our farm and I was using my mother-in-law’s deep-frying cast iron skillet.
Back then I didn’t understand cast iron. I used to think, why would anyone cook with a pan that heavy?
Then I figured it out.
Cast iron makes food taste better. It holds heat. It stays steady. And after you cook in it long enough, it starts to carry something forward. The pan remembers what it has cooked.
People can say pans don’t remember. This cast iron pan does.
How This Fried Chicken Salad Started
At our farm I would fry too much chicken on purpose. Not because I couldn’t count. Because I wanted tomorrow handled.
Frying chicken like that gives you more than dinner. You get that crackle when it hits the oil. You get the smell that stays in the air.
You get little shards of crust on the paper towels. You get a kitchen that feels used in the best way.
And you get leftovers that turn into lunch without a big plan.
The next day I’d chop romaine. Always romaine. Sometimes I would add other lettuces but mostly romaine. I wanted crunch that could stand up to fried chicken and dressing.
Sometimes the dressing was something I made. Sometimes it was Italian dressing from a bottle.
And I didn’t feel guilty about it.
I’ve learned people love to perform about food. Like everything has to be scratch-made to count. But some of the most reliable things in a kitchen come in packaging.
Bottled dressing. Boxed cake mix.
The stuff people side-eye until they taste it done right.
Fried Chicken, on Purpose
I still remember eating it on the porch in the summer.
The rain would come in hard. Not sideways, just straight down. The porch was so big we could sit in the middle and never get wet.
Sometimes I’d laugh at how hard it was coming down and how safe we still were.
We’d sit back from the screen and let the weather do its thing.
The air would turn cool for a minute. Everything would smell like rain. Wet dirt. Leaves. That clean smell that makes you breathe deeper without thinking about it.
And I’d eat some version of that fried chicken salad.
Not plated in a perfect restaurant way. Just all the ingredients together in a seemingly haphazard pile. No performance. No Instagram-worthy photo. Just romaine, dressing, and chopped fried chicken with the skin and crust mixed in, because those are the parts that actually taste like the chicken.
It wasn’t a recipe I wrote down.
It was just how I ate.
How Fried Chicken Salad Became Restaurant Food
Years later, when I had my restaurant in Georgia, I tried to put more honest salads on the menu. Salads that felt like dinner, not like a side someone orders out of guilt.
That fried chicken salad was the one I almost left off the menu.
It didn’t sound fancy enough.
And when something is that close to you, you don’t always realize it’s special. You have been around it so long it feels obvious.
But it was delicious. It was special.
I put it on the menu anyway. Back then, charging $21 for a salad felt like pushing it.
On the menu it became chopped romaine, cherry tomatoes, and scallions with blue cheese dressing. I added paper-thin onions too.
I’d soak them in a solution of baking soda and water first to take the harsh edge off, so the onion showed up without taking over.
The fried chicken breast went on top with a sriracha honey glaze.
Back then we didn’t call it hot honey. Who knew I was ahead of the trend.
People loved it. They came in on Fridays and ordered it like it belonged to their weekend.
One of my best friends, Amy, who owned a gallery next door, would eat it even though she swore she didn’t like garlic and she didn’t like raw onions either.
She didn’t like them until she did.
And on Saturday night, when the restaurant was winding down and I knew we were closed Sunday and Monday, that was one of the salads I would ring up and take home.
Because out of everything on that menu, it still tasted like the way I actually eat.
What This Fried Chicken Salad Taught Me
I didn’t invent that salad trying to be clever.
I came up with it trying to make tomorrow easier.
That’s what I miss when people talk about cooking like it has to be complicated to matter.
People scoff at simple shortcuts all the time.
Boxed cake mix.
Bottled dressing.
Store-bought fried chicken. But sometimes the quiet things in a kitchen matter the most — the same way garlic can whisper instead of shout.
But I’ve worked in bakeries where the most popular cakes started with a box. People can say what they want. They still ate them.
That’s the difference.
Not whether it came from scratch.
Whether you knew what to do with it.
Sometimes a dish earns its place on a menu.
And sometimes it earns something else.
People came in on Fridays and ordered that salad like it belonged to their weekend.
The truth is, it belonged to mine first.
Chef Alexis Hernandez writes The Other Side of the Stove. His work has also appeared in News of Sun City Center and South County, and he has appeared on Food Network Star and Cutthroat Kitchen.
