Make This Cult-Classic NYC Chile Fried Chicken at Home

The chicken, which marries the pastry-like crispness of traditional Taiwanese fried chicken with the satisfying cragginess of the Southern-fried variety, is dunked in an aromatic Tianjin chile oil fortified with numbing Sichuan peppercorns, duck fat, and tart vinegar powder. It’s a best seller on his menu, enjoying near cult status in New York, and it’s a frank and generous expression of Huang’s own senses of flavor and hospitality.

Although Huang (pictured below) doesn’t call Pecking House a Southern restaurant, the chef draws inspiration from Southern classics, and showcases this in manifestations of dirty fried rice, glazed turnips with miso and almond, and heirloom bean salad with sesame. To Huang, the restaurant closely reflects his own history. “It’s really a personal expression of growing up Chinese American.”

Restaurants have always been in Huang’s life, though becoming a chef was never the intended career path. “I grew up in a restaurant, which is a very typical story in the Chinese immigrant diaspora. So, I was always around good food, interested in food, loved being around restaurants, but actually wasn’t allowed to cook because I was a musician, and God forbid I hurt my hands. You know, all these immigrant parents who come here to work a difficult restaurant job, they don’t want their kids to go into it. So, I was discouraged from being in restaurants.”

But while attending college in Illinois, Huang felt the pull to return to restaurant life. “I really missed being part of the energy. A classroom and studying music was just the complete opposite. It was just so lonely and quiet. Being in a restaurant is always where I felt at home.”

When Huang returned to New York after college, he sought out work in professional kitchens and soon found himself in some of New York's top restaurants: Café Boulud, Gramercy Tavern, and Eleven Madison Park, where he climbed the ladder to sous chef, a position he held when the restaurant was awarded the title of Best Restaurant in the World in 2017 by Restaurant magazine.

In January 2020, after four years at Eleven Madison Park, Huang was ready to strike out on his own. “I wanted to try to open a fine dining restaurant, as my training had implied. Then, the pandemic happened, and life changed for everybody.”

As restaurants began closing, Huang went to work at his mother’s restaurant, Pearl East on Long Island, where he assumed the role of “de facto dim sum chef,” something he says he’d never done before. Then, in September 2020, he turned his attention to his uncle’s shuttered restaurant in Queens, Peking House, which had been in his family for 40 years and would eventually inspire the name for Pecking House. According to Huang, Peking House had been closed since lockdown. “I basically walked into an abandoned kitchen and started figuring stuff out.”

For Huang, figuring stuff out meant a shift from fine dining to comfort food. “I’m very much a New Yorker, but I just really love country cooking,” he says. “It’s just something I’ve always really enjoyed learning about. It’s very honest. And fried chicken is an extremely approachable food that people just enjoy. This recipe was kind of an accidental brainchild of growing up eating KFC, Taiwanese fried chicken, and Sichuan flavors. It just kind of all came together one day.”

Huang started selling fried chicken meals via Instagram throughout New York City, personally delivering about 20 meals a week himself. When Time Out New York took notice and wrote about his chicken, things exploded.

“It seemed like everybody read it, and all of a sudden I had an inbox that was flooded with messages from people wanting to order the chicken.” Subsequent articles by The New Yorker and the New York Times pushed the line of fried chicken requests to over 10,000. “It became known as the ‘waitlist chicken.’”

In September 2022, the pandemic hustle turned into a successful brick-and-mortar, as Huang opened the doors to Pecking House in Brooklyn. “I knew [fried chicken] was always where the success was, especially how it related to Asian American people. Because they all relate to the experience of growing up eating American fried chicken while also having this juxtaposition against the kind of fried chicken they’re growing up with at home or in their various neighborhoods. I think when I realized that that was kind of what made the food here fun, this intersection of Asian cooking and Southern country cooking, that was the springboard.”