don’t eat fried chicken much. It’s like hot fudge sundaes or sex with strangers – I quite enjoy it on occasion, but it leaves me feeling guilty at best, icky at worst. I can’t remember the last time I had fried chicken (or a hot fudge sundae, or sex with a stranger)—at least, not counting today.

On a recommendation from a friend, I stopped at Prince’s Spicy Fried Chicken, a diner in a run-down sector of northwest Nashville. I knew it couldn’t be much of a tourist destination. The clerk at my Days Inn drew a complete blank when I asked for directions.

“Prince’s Fried Chicken?” he asked. “I know Popeye’s. Is that all right?”

But Prince’s is one of those local favorites, the kind that garner ecstatic reviews in the Times and Gourmet for their “authentic cuisine” (thus making it a bit less “local”). In this case, the cuisine is spicy fried chicken--like buffalo wings writ large, hot and tasty without the annoying, midget shape. My leg of chicken was served with white bread and pickles, like at barbecue restaurants. I needed it, too, in order to cut all the incredible heat of the cayenne. (A side of ranch ran me a quarter.) Prince’s is just the kind of spot travelers always look for—part challenge, part comfort. But I must admit I did leave feeling a bit icky, and I had to wash my hands twice to clean off all that grease.

From there, I headed downtown and ducked into a bar called Robert’s Western World, which is where I’m writing this. It’s a real honky tonk, too, with cowboy boots lining the wall and a fry grill smelling up the place. Some graffiti in the girls’ bathroom reads, rather unconvincingly: “Kenny Chesney was here.” There’s a country band picking the hell out of their gee-tars onstage. (Best line of stage banter: “Don’t be afraid to tip the band. I got four kids, and they need cigarettes.” Second best: “Sure, pretend like I’m the only one who’s been in jail.) It’s the kind of spot I used to avoid, but now I seek it out. Loud, smoky, dingy as your unwashed sheets. At 6:45pm, the place is already starting to fill up, and I’m trying to figure out if these people are tourists or regulars. Guess it doesn’t matter, really. Right now, I feel like a little of both.