The Business Side

Honey Butter Fried Chicken’s Tour of The Scary Basements of Chicago

Honey Butter Fried Chicken at Dose Market long ago.
Honey Butter Fried Chicken at Dose Market long ago. Photo: Sky Full of Bacon

We were talking with a restaurant owner the other night about the line between restaurant news and sheer gossip, and said we often find the most mundane-seeming stories the most fascinating… that so and so got canned for being a drunk is a yawn, but how a particular food gets onto everybody’s menu at once is often a great, Byzantine story. As if to satisfy our interest in nitty gritty inside stories, Anthony Todd pops up today at Chicagoist with the thrilling saga of… Honey Butter Fried Chicken looking for a space. Think nothing could be less interesting than someone else’s year and a half of shopping with a realtor? Think again, as owners Josh Kulp and Christine Cikowski talk about all the things you see and learn when you’re scouting the city for the right space…

There was one place that we looked at that shall remain unnamed. We went down into the basement and there was a bathtub waterline three feet off the ground. It was the second time we’d looked at it, and it wasn’t there the first time. So it had flooded three feet in that time. I think the person just tried to pretend it didn’t happen. The furnace and water heater had been sitting in it.

You can tell that, like online dating, seeing what was really out there only made them more cynical over time. But in the end, it worked out happily— they’re opening soon in the former La Finca space on Elston, and have a good relationship with the family who sold it to them. [Chicagoist]

Honey Butter Fried Chicken’s Tour of The Scary Basements of Chicago