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Others, however, have been more critical, expressing skepticism that what has been proclaimed the best fried chicken in the city by food media would turn out to be, as they put it harshly, “chicken fingers.” I don’t think that’s fair—chicken fingers are a frozen mass-produced product, and Honey Butter buys locally raised chicken and butchers and brines them themselves each day—but it is true that “artisanal chicken” and “boneless” don’t tend to go together. So I sat down with chef and co-owner Josh Kulp to find out why they made that choice—and to answer the second question it raises, which is, so what do you do with all those bones and all the by-products of whole chicken (besides, obviously, making schmaltz-confited mashed potatoes?)
We butcher whole chickens here. We went back and forth for a while whether or not we would order parts, because you can actually order machine-cut chickens. We tried them before we opened, and never quite felt good about the butchering process. There’s just something you miss when you don’t have a human doing the butchering. We’re pretty particular about how we want the chicken to come out, so we went with whole birds. Plus, you get all the benefits of all the other parts—all the bones, all the wings, all the fat, all the skin, all the chicken tenders, that you can do other things with. So we’re trying to make use of the whole bird.
I think it was honestly our tastes. Every time we’d do a boneless thigh, when you were able to eat that whole thigh, in all its fatty juicy deliciousness, without stopping, there’s something really satisfying about it. Again, I love a roast chicken on the bone. My mom, whenever we had chicken we’d throw the bones to her, because she’d eat the marrow out of every single bone.
Once we’ve taken the breasts and the thighs and drums off we end up with a carcass for each chicken, we have two wings, two tenders, and then a pile of skin and a pile of fat. And we are doing something with every one of them. We also have some plans because—we have some chef friends who are knocking on the door, hoping to score some chicken bones. Because we honestly have more than any person should have.
Do you think you’ll be able to make enough other things to keep up with the amount of fried chicken you’re making?
