Long Beach will finally have a joint dedicated to Nashville hot chicken as Jay Bird’s opens this Friday at The Hangar inside East Long Beach’s LBX retail center.<\/p>\n
Jay Bird’s\u2014one of the final spaces to open inside LBX’s popular food hall following staples like Chef Thomas Ortega’s stellar taco shop Amorcito<\/a>\u2014has much to live up to in terms of defining itself as Nashville hot chicken.<\/p>\n The region\u2019s most proper introduction to this fiery piece of fried chicken came by the way of Howlin\u2019 Ray\u2019s, a tiny-but-mighty bird shop tucked inside a mini-mall in Downtown Los Angeles’ Chinatown. With a line that rarely, if ever, dips under 45 minutes thanks to its cult-like following, Howlin\u2019 is the closest thing you can score to the joint that invented Nashville hot chicken, the famed Prince\u2019s Hot Chicken Shack.<\/p>\n What Prince\u2019s created\u2014and, by extension, what Howlin\u2019 brought to a West Coast crowd\u2014is an oddly addicting piece of incredibly spicy fried chicken that shouldn\u2019t be addicting.<\/p>\n Prince\u2019s and Howlin\u2019 both offer six levels of heat, and if one ventures into anything beyond mild, let alone their most intense heat, you\u2019ll find that it is a heat that doesn\u2019t just make beads of sweat push themselves out onto your forehead. It\u2019s not a heat that just make your lips intensely tingle. This is a heat that will linger with you, sometimes for days. (My Dude and I have made the mistake\u2014twice, mind you\u2014of mowing through an extra hot Howlin\u2019 Ray’s sandwich, and it was with us for three days after. Three days, no joke, and many a bathroom trip.)<\/p>\n No one should ever want to experience this repeatedly but, make no question, people end up returning over and over. And that leaves\u00a0Jay Bird\u2019s Nashville Hot Chicken with a standard that no other place in the region has succeeded in meeting except Howlin\u2019.<\/p>\n Long Beach Exchange is located at\u00a03991 N. Lakewood Blvd.<\/em><\/p>\n Brian Addison is a columnist and editor for the Long Beach Post.\u00a0<\/em>Reach him at\u00a0brian@lbpost.com\u00a0or on social media at\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,\u00a0Twitter<\/a>,\u00a0Instagram<\/a>, and\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Long Beach will finally have a joint dedicated to Nashville hot chicken as Jay Bird’s opens Friday at The Hangar inside East Long Beach’s LBX retail center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":65581,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[47],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food","tag-long-beach-exchange","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}