The Best Fried Chicken Spots in Detroit

Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken
Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken | Flickr/Evan Blaser
Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken | Flickr/Evan Blaser

Though it's flagrantly thumbing our nose up at any dietary do-gooding, what we usually want isn’t kale or quinoa or seitan. No, what we Detroiters need right now (and always) is hot, crisp fried chicken. And for that, we turn our hopeful faces to Detroit’s many skilled purveyors of the deep-fried bird. This list may not be comprehensive. If nothing else, it doesn’t have “My Aunt’s House” or “That One Lady from Next Door” on it, and those will always, always be the best places to get fried chicken. Nevertheless, this list offers enough brined, salted, deep-fried cheer to try for at least the next few months.

Ms. E-Vee’s Soul Food

8 Mile

Sharing a strip mall with a busy legal marijuana dispensary on 8 Mile, Ms. E-Vee’s is the rare case where the weed store benefits more from the restaurant next door than vice versa. The food at Ms. E-Vee’s is beyond delicious, from the sweet, fluffy cornbread to the fried chicken, a luxuriously savory, crispy miracle whose flavor permeates clear to the bone. This is amazingly good food, and the sides are just as nice. The candied yams have the perfect touch of vanilla, and the mashed potatoes, rich with butter and heavy cream, are are made from scratch. Ms. E-Vee’s also serves pork chops, meat loaf, fried catfish, and roasted chicken. The sweet potato pie, sticky-sweet custard balanced with the heat of cinnamon and ginger and baked in a perfect butter crust, makes a run at Detroit’s best. This place is always worth the 20 minute wait, and the way the sides are separated with tin foil shows uncommon attention to detail.

Kuzzo's Chicken & Waffles
Kuzzo's Chicken & Waffles

Kuzzo’s Chicken and Waffles

University District

This Livernois powerhouse, small, but mighty, dares diners to pair chicken and waffles, and while they're at it, offers some of the city’s most delicious candied yams. The chicken is juicy, with a crisp, lightly salted coating; the waffles are light and delicious, too. In addition to all-day breakfast and some of Detroit’s best fried chicken, Kuzzo’s whips up interesting cocktails, including a spiked sweet tea that incorporates bourbon, fresh lemon juice, and honey. Kuzzo’s offers red, blue, and purple Kool-Aid and house-made lemonade for the non-drinkers. It’s the perfect place for dinner after a few hours checking out Livernois’ avenue of fashion. It’s also convenient to Good Cakes and Bakes (next door, in fact) if you’d like to take a piece of caramel cake home to go with the leftovers.

Lodge Diner at Motor City Casino

Midtown

This place is an homage to posters of yesteryear. You might not expect soulful Southern cooking from a restaurant in the basement of a casino, but if you try the fried chicken, you’ll be a believer. Served with creamy, scratch-made mashed potatoes and perfectly al dente green beans, the fried chicken at Motor City was juicy, lightly crisp, and not at all greasy.

Green Dot Stables
Green Dot Stables

Green Dot Stables

Corktown

This popular West Lafayette eatery helmed by Chefs Matt Hollerbach and Nelly Gonzalez is beloved in Detroit for many reasons -- there's an infamous menu of sliders, sides, soups, and salads, followed very closely by a long list of mixed drinks, all for about $3. While the cheeseburger slider wins hearts and minds, and the wedge salad is that perfect bite of chilly lettuce, rich bleu cheese, and bacon, it was the fried chicken slider that cooed to us in the first place. It deserves a place on this list, if for no other reason than sometimes you want that salty, fatty, juicy chicken dinner to last exactly three bites. Sometimes because you’re healthy and just came from the gym. Mostly because you have at least three other sliders to try, and variety is the spice of burgers.

Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken

Midtown

A Tennessee original taken national by owners Gertrude and Vernon “Gus” Bonner, Gus’s offers a take on Memphis hot chicken. The Detroit outlet, in a brick storefront on 3rd Street (convenient to indie theater Cinema Detroit), offers the small franchise’s fried chicken, a very crispy take, and one just spicy enough that your eyes might water just a tiny bit. The meat inside is very moist and the hot sauce on the side may be more heat than some like, but if nothing else, you get a little something for your purse or packet drawer with your order.

Gold Cash Gold Detroit
Courtesy of Gold Cash Gold

Gold Cash Gold

Corktown

Gold Cash Cold has a serious local rep for fried chicken served in a dining room lousy with haute hipster realness. The place is beautiful, and the food is farm-to-table. We admire the crispy skin on GCG’s signature fried chicken, and can fault neither the sides (lovely mashed potatoes here, too). What divides people is also the same thing that many diners call GCG's fried chicken the best in the city: the dill brine. The chicken takes on the piquant nature of a dill pickle, and you either love it or you don’t. If you don’t, have the fried pigs’ ears -- it's hard to displease with the deep fried pig.

Village Market at Grosse Pointe Farms

Grosse Pointe

We know what you’re thinking: “Grocery fried chicken? Why???” Here’s why: Village Market, serving the Pointes since 1938 out of an adorably compact brick building on Mack Ave, has fried chicken that will change minds about prepared grocery store foods, at least in the eastern 'burbs. The chicken here is tender, heats up well, and the dark coating is spicy and aromatic; a little greasy, but in the way of lakeside picnics and red-checked table cloths. Get the chicken while the place is uncrowded and small -- Grosse Pointe Farms City Council just approved plans for the store to expand, and Village Market will double in size and take over an entire city block by sometime in 2017.

Craft Work
Craft Work

Craft Work

West Village

Located in trendy West English Village, the New American favorite next door to Red Hook Coffee serves a high end, farm-to-table take on our favorite comfort food. The chicken doesn’t disappoint, and the mashed potatoes are creamy and light. The bacon braised greens offer an interesting play between rich and bitter. They’re nobody’s mama’s anything, but delicious nevertheless. The coffee we ordered with dinner (actually, an Americano, as Craft Work doesn’t traffic in drip brewing of any kind), comes with exactly one lump of unbleached sugar, perched adorably on a tiny spoon. The chicken comes from local farms, and, we understand, may have been named Colin.

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Rebecca Golden lives in Detroit and is working on her second book, Welcome to Detroit. Follow her on Twitter @GoldenReb for subversive ideas about food, drink, cats, and the city.