America’s chicken obsession is shifting to dark meat

I sat down at an outdoor table at New York City’s Hudson Yards one bright May afternoon with a bag containing two of star chef David Chang’s entries in the fast-food fried-chicken-sandwich wars. They were both Fuku Spicy Fried Chicken Sandos, but with a crucial difference: one was made of thigh meat, the other of breast meat. When Chang opened his first Fuku in 2015 at the site of his original, reputation-making Momofuku Noodle Bar in Manhattan’s East Village, it offered only thigh-meat sandwiches. Chefs and others who think a lot about food are nearly unanimous in their belief that dark chicken meat is juicier and tastier than white meat, and while Chang doesn’t always truckle to elite culinary opinion — witness his highly amusing pro-iceberg-lettuce Twitter rant that I had the honor of inspiring last fall — he is a self-proclaimed “dark-meat loyalist.” Read more