Dave’s Hot Chicken fires up Queen City tender war

National chain opens second NH location in Manchester

Now that the New Hampshire primary is over and the national media has moved on to South Carolina, we can return our attention to another slugfest.

The chicken tender battle.

This week, Dave’s Hot Chicken, a trendy chain whose investors include the rapper, Drake, opened in Manchester, serving fried chicken sandwiches and chicken tenders on a retail strip already saturated with fast-food joints.

Co-founder Arman Oganesyan announced in 2021 that Drake had joined as a major investor. Since Dave’s Hot Chicken first emerged as a pop-up restaurant in 2017, the company has opened more than 100 locations, including one in Portsmouth and two in the Boston area. The Manchester location has been home to a succession of national and regional chain concepts over the past 20 years: Chili’s, the British Beer Company and, most recently, the Flight Center. Dave’s Hot Chicken is the first to focus on fast food served from the counter.

Dave’s Hot Chicken already faces neighborhood chicken competition from Popeyes, which replaced a Pizza Hut on South Willow in 2020, and soon will face off with yet another chicken restaurant concept, Raising Cane’s, a Louisiana chain that specializes in chicken tenders. That company displaced longtime Great New Hampshire Restaurants brand CJ’s on South Willow and plans to build a new 3,200-square-foot fast-food restaurant there with two drive-thru lanes, as reported last year by Jonathan Phelps of the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger King on South Willow also hawk fried chicken. As for the rest of the Queen City, find me a single neighborhood where you can’t find a restaurant within a few blocks of your house that serves hand-breaded chicken tenders. Remember, this is the city that invented them at the Puritan Backroom Restaurant decades ago.

How hot is too hot?

Dave’s Hot Chicken is not kidding about the hot part: Its hottest flavor, the Reaper, is an adults-only menu item and requires patrons to sign a waiver that absolves the company of liability and acknowledges such potential risk as “bodily injury, property damage, emotional distress, or even death.”

The waiver — I signed one Wednesday night during a private “friends and family” event — reads like a mix of a legalese and cheeky marketing. Every reference to REAPER is printed in uppercase letters and includes a trademark icon, not the kind of language you would expect to be used to hold a corporation harmless.

That said, don’t try the Reaper unless you enjoy testing the limits of your taste buds and digestive tract. Having a fair amount of experience with hot peppers, I danced with a Reaper tender on a lark, cutting off a small piece with a plastic knife and fork. If you’ve ever been dumb enough to choose the hottest flavor at Buffalo Wild Wings, this one is definitely even hotter than that. After tempering the heat with a few bites of macaroni and cheese and a sip of a chocolate milkshake, I experimented by cutting off the tender’s breading to see if the pepper had penetrated the breast meat. Yes, it did. Fear the REAPER.

For my chicken tender slider, which was garnished with kale slaw, I chose the “hot” level, a couple of rungs below the Reaper. I’m not a good judge of how spicy the slider was because by comparison it was as mild as mashed potatoes, but I will confirm that it was tasty.

Dave Hot’s Chicken may have a future as a takeout joint. Like most fast-food outlets, it’s not a place you would choose to linger long unless you’re part of the Taco Bell generation. Hip-hop music bouncing off the walls and bare concrete floor filled the space the night my wife and I visited. It’s too bad the restaurant seemed to be using the Flight Center’s former speakeasy-style hidden room as a place for staff to congregate. It would have made a great place for the old folks to find some quiet.

New Hampshire’s ‘Hot 200’

One of my favorite pastimes growing up was to check out the Billboard 200 album chart, which I could read for free thanks to the library at Parkside Junior High in Manchester, which subscribed to the music industry trade magazine.

The lineup of the national sales chart changed every week, though some bestsellers like Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and Carole King’s “Tapestry” enjoyed long runs that lasted for years.

The first two editions of our “New Hampshire 200” book, which spotlights the Granite State’s most influential business leaders, had a fair amount of overlap. For our upcoming third edition, we decided to create an entirely new list of 200, with help from past honorees.

We’ll be celebrating the publication of the “2024 New Hampshire 200” on April 11 at the Grappone Conference Center in Concord. As of press time, about 375 people had already registered for the networking event.

Don’t miss it. We expect it will be a hot one.