Venue Review: Price's Chicken Coop

Southern-fried tradition: Speedy service, tasty food is a way of life at Price's

(no rating)

By Helen Schwab, food critic
The Charlotte Observer

Let us pause, to honor a tradition.

I write, of course, of Price's Chicken Coop.

Next week, we'll share readers' reminiscences of restaurants they have loved and lost in the Charlotte area. Working on that collection, I trolled through fat files of news photographs depicting restaurants of the '60s, '70s and '80s, most long gone. Among the optimistic owners standing under brand-new signs and servers setting down dated dishes amid dated decor were two very different photos. I pulled them out.

The first shows a man in a white paper cap, one towel-wrapped hand holding a fryer handle, the other fishing with tongs in fiercely bubbling oil. He has a gray mustache and a faint smile. Behind him, a man with his name stitched onto his shirt pays a cashier.

The second is a kitchen-eye's view of the counter, one man caught mid-sprint toward stacks of white Price's boxes. The photographer typed across its back: "Speed behind the counter has been a tradition at Price's." This was taken in 1980.

It could have been taken in 1965.

It could have been taken yesterday.

Price's Chicken Coop opened in 1962, an outgrowth of the Dilworth Poultry Co. Carl Price began that in the Depression, buying chickens and eggs from Union County farmers and selling them in Charlotte. For a time, the Prices delivered chickens and eggs to Dilworth families by bicycle, then turned the business to wholesale. But the carryout-meal operation flourished, and created an intersection of lots of lives, at a time when one Coop sign saw fit to declare: "We serve two kinds of people: Ladies and Gentlemen."

Still does.

Pull into its little lot and you'll find an elderly white truck with a "MARINES" bumper sticker beside a new cherry-red Honda, a slightly less elderly white Mecklenburg County government truck between a dented compact with a holiday bow on its grille and a shiny burgundy van. Walk in the door, past the seller of framed 2Pac posters and T-shirts, and you're behind an Office Depot worker and a man in paint-spattered pants, and next to two young women in silk blouses and wool pants.

The line's six-deep at 12:40 this day, and 11 workers bustle behind the counter, frying, packaging, ringing up. Three complete dinners, a sandwich, two teas and a piece of plastic-wrapped lemon chess pie: $20.46. (If you need an extra tartar sauce with your fish sandwich, add 15 cents to that total.)

"Sorry. All our tables are filled up today," deadpans the gray-haired man with wire-rim specs and a ball cap who takes our order. Though we know there are no tables, we look dumb anyway. He smiles. "I get a lot of people that way."

In minutes, we have boxes of thin, white cardboard, with the menu printed on them, heavy but not yet grease-spotted. If you're taking it back to work, the spots will get there with you. (If you order from the sign inside Price's, you also get a little extra information: What's "1/4 Chicken" on the menu is "1/4 of 31/4 lb CHICKEN" on the sign. Roughly, one presumes.)

I for one don't need such details about the chewy-crisp-outside, juicy-inside chicken. Or the fish sandwich that's three big pieces of perch on a soft white bun. Or the crunchily breaded 10 medium-sized shrimp. And if you know that the "tater rounds" resemble smashed Tots, the coleslaw is mayo-y with a pickle slice on top, that the rolls are usually soft but occasionally dry and the pups are golf-ball-sized with little sweetness, you know what you're getting with every dinner.

Tea is Maxwell House, says the menu, and comes with the little kind of ice that melts so gracefully.

Inside, amid all the bustle, it's somehow pretty quiet. You hear a wave of sizzling every so often - but no contemporary musical soundtrack. And no clock ticking.

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Price's Chicken Coop, 1614 Camden Road at Park Avenue; 333-9866. Lunch and dinner $1.35 to $7.30; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday. No checks are accepted, and leave half an hour for pickup. (And there is no delivery.)

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