One of our town’s most notorious fried chickens has made a major list.
It’s no coincidence that the popularity of the long-running reality show Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s (its final episode aired in June) helped put matriarch Robbie “Miss Robbie” Montgomery—and her famous fried chicken—on the national culinary stage. Last month, The Daily Meal named Sweetie Pie’s yard bird No. 52 on its list of the 75 Best Fried Chickens in America.
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Seventy-five? Yes, but it’s a list that’s heavy on places like New York. (That’s sort of like praising barbecue in New York, a place that was late to the game and probably wouldn’t have ever had any contenders at all were it not for St. Louisan Danny Meyer’s Blue Smoke.) Several in Nashville made the list, of course, and through the mid-South, including a No. 2 nod to Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken (its local outpost is located in Maplewood).
And there are lots of, if you’ll pardon the phrase, upper-crust places like Fearing’s in the Ritz-Carlton in Dallas. They put Robbie Montgomery in a category with Thomas Keller, whose chicken at Ad Hoc appears in the list. We will say the list runs the gamut from spots like those two to places where the chicken comes on paper plates.
The crunchy battered pieces of chicken Sweetie Pie’s serves up are indeed remarkable, with an onion-y, garlicky seasoning that charms. If you throw in some sweet potatoes and greens, it’ll be heaven, as long as you include cobbler… real cobbler, of course, not that cake batter stuff that’s become too common in recent years.
The only other Missouri spot is the No. 13 mention for the venerable Stroud’s in Kansas City, and there’s nothing any closer on the Illinois side than quite a few in Chicago. (The list skews towards the biggest cities.) The number one spot? Willie Mae’s Scotch House in New Orleans—whose chicken, we admit, is pretty danged fabulous.
