Austin City Saloon

606-280-7448

302 South Main Street

Opening hours: Monday-Wednesday 11am-2pm, 5pm-10pm; Thursday-Saturday 11 a.m.-2 p.m., 5 p.m.-1 a.m.; Sunday noon-5 p.m.

Dish: Cluckin’ Hot Chicken Challenge – Two slow-smoked chicken thigh quarters drenched in Austin City’s signature Gun Smoke sauce *waiver required*

Why did you choose this dish and what inspired it?

I have a lot of people asking for a hot sauce, something you can’t get anywhere else, so I developed our Gun Smoke sauce which is ghost peppers, Trinidad Scorpion pepper powder and habaneros peppers and ancho. I mashed it and smoked it. I love chicken thigh quarters, we smoke them in house for 12 hours and the reason we decided to collect them is because we have a lot of people asking for them so I thought if I could do a dish and take it out that we have the “hottest legs” in town, I think that would be a good kind of gimmick and give people something they can’t get anywhere else. Renunciation — it’s a challenge and it’s meant to be a challenge. I thought if we were going to give this to people, they had to know how hot it really was.

How many times has Austin City participated in Chicken Week and why?

We participated last year for the first time. We love it – we love that it brings people downtown, we love that we can present something a little different that we don’t normally have on the menu, we love that we can provide Corbin with something new and exciting. Personally, I love competition, so you can see all these exciting things that everyone is doing and we can show what we can do and it’s a lot of fun.