A compelling treat at the Roadshow!
By Ari Weinzweig
In the scheme of all the popular favorites on the Roadhouse menu—fried chicken, fresh fish, BBQ, ribs, those remarkable black pepper fries, breakfast burritos, butterscotch pudding—it would be easy to miss the smoked chicken salad. This is my insider’s invitation to come try it! It’s so good, so comforting—one of my favorite go-tos during uncertain times.
The story behind chicken salad.
I’d have to imagine that someone made something like chicken salad centuries ago, but its formal entrée into American culinary history came in 1863, midway through the Civil War, when Liam Gray, a shop owner in the small town of Wakefield, Rhode Island (on the southern seacoast of the state) began to promote his version of it. He used cooked chicken, mayonnaise, fresh tarragon, and grapes. Gray’s preparation got so popular that the shop he’d started as a retail meat market gradually morphed into a bustling deli featuring a wide array of prepared foods.
Why our chicken salad is so good!
The Roadhouse Smoked Chicken Salad is simpler and, for me at least, more compelling. I love dishes like this one that highlight exceptional ingredients and let you really taste them at their best without too much “other stuff” to get in the way. It starts with the whole, oak-smoked, Amish chicken. Deli co-managing partner Rick Strutz says they’re one of the best foods we have in the ZCoB. I agree! Their flavor and texture are far superior to typical supermarket chicken. The chickens are rubbed with salt and Tellicherry black pepper and then smoked gently over oak, giving the chicken an exceptionally full and complex flavor. Hand-pulled, coarsely cut, and then mixed with Hellman’s mayonnaise, salt, freshly ground black pepper, chopped celery, and onion. There’s an essay in “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace” with the subtitle, “Why Treating Our Products and Tools with Dignity Makes a Meaningful Difference.” This Smoked Chicken Salad, in my mind, is very flavorful evidence of what we can make happen when we do just that.
Ways to enjoy our chicken salad sandwich.
The Roadshow has the Smoked Chicken Salad on the carryout menu in a sandwich form, but if you ask for it atop a green salad, it’s a wonderful meal! Or try it on some toasted Roadhouse bread (one of my favorites from the Bakehouse). I like the Smoked Chicken Salad best with a couple strips of the Nueske family’s applewood-smoked bacon from Wisconsin. If you want to have some fun, I highly recommend putting a handful of our Tellicherry Black Pepper Potato Chips onto the sandwich—the crunch with the soft smokiness of the chicken salad is superb! If you’re entertaining (or entertaining yourself with a snack), just put a bit of chicken salad on one of the chips and eat it like that!
One other insider’s insight: ask us to sprinkle some “fried chicken crumbles” onto your chicken salad. They’re the crunchy fried bits from the fried chicken we use in the Fried Chicken Macaroni & Cheese. They make a great contrast with the chicken salad!