The Bay Area has a lot of fantastic options for fried chicken. I love the fried chicken at Sideboard in Lafayette, California. I also love the more tempura-like batter from Proposition Chicken, and the hot chicken sandwiches from Plucked.
I’ll share our top pick for the Bay Area’s best fried chicken, but also 6 other amazing places to try. Read on to see them all!
But the best fried chicken in the Bay Area comes from an unexpected source. It’s an admittedly fancy, but strangely located, restaurant inside the Oakland Museum of California.
Town Fare Restaurant, recently taken over by acclaimed soul food chef Michelle McQueen, serves up amazing Southern food. You can get deviled eggs, honey butter cornbread, some of the most decadent and intense mac & cheese I’ve ever eaten, and specialties like jackfruit tacos.
But the star of the show here is really the fried chicken. McQueen serves it several ways, both as a chicken and waffles dish, and a simple plate with a few sides.
The chicken itself is served right out of the fryer, so it’s incredibly hot and fresh. Town Fare clearly uses clean oil, as there’s none of the off flavors you sometimes get from restaurants that don’t specialize in fried food, or that don’t have the budget to change their oil as frequently.
The batter used here is clearly lightly seasoned. It’s got a little saltiness to it, but it’s not overwhelming, and it’s not hot or spicy either.
McQueen brines her fried chicken for 24 hours before frying it. That ensures that the inside stays moist and delicious, even as the outside is clearly fried at a high temperature. This results in an interior that is perfectly cooked without getting at all dry, and an exterior crust that tastes almost like biting into a piece of pork crackling.
It’s an amazing combination that, on a recent visit, had me gnawing at the backside of the bones to get every last bit of breading off.
You can opt for white meat or dark meat. Obviously, you should choose dark meat.
A lot of chicken joints specialize in chicken and make their side dishes essentially an afterthought. One of the nice things about Town Fare is that they absolutely don’t do that.
The fried chicken is served alongside rice and beans made with smoked turkey. If the fried chicken wasn’t so good, this dish would upstage it. I’ve never tasted so much complex flavor in such a simple side.
The fried chicken plate also comes with a giant helping of honey cornbread. I usually end up taking most of my slice home or sharing it with my kids.
You can get the fried chicken at Town Fare served as chicken and waffles. Honestly, though, I find their waffles to be just OK. The fried chicken plate is really the way to go.
At $19, it’s not cheap, but the kind of attention to detail—again, 24 hours of brining—required to make this dish justifies the price.
It doesn’t hurt that Town Fare is a beautiful setting within one of the state’s museums. You can enjoy the food, and then spend several hours wandering through the galleries about California’s natural and cultural history.
The food, of course, is part of that history. That’s part of what makes the experience of eating there so satisfying. The food is amazing on its own, but it also stands within the cultural history of the Bay Area’s patterns of migration and diverse peoples.
Head over to Town Fare for some tasty food, some world-class learning, and the best fried chicken the Bay Area has to offer.
Here are our other picks for amazing Bay Area fried chicken.
#2: Sideboard
Sideboard has some of my favorite traditional fried chicken in the Bay Area. But finding it on their menu isn’t easy. When most people think about Sideboard, they think of the local chain’s original Danville restaurant, which is a popular brunch spot in the East Bay.
There’s a problem, though. That location doesn’t serve fried chicken — it’s only available at the Sideboard in Lafayette. And even there, the chicken isn’t easy to find. Sometimes you can only see it scribbled on a chalkboard above the counter, or subtly tucked away in the Specials section of the restaurant’s paper menu.
If you locate and order Sideboard’s fried chicken, though, you won’t be disappointed. Firstly, it comes by the bucket (a half bucket is available for smaller parties or less-brave individuals). Also, it’s super high quality, as Sideboard uses chicken from local legend Mary’s Chicken to make their delectable buckets. Make no mistake; this is traditional, American fried chicken in all its flakey, buttermilk glory.
The absolute best way to eat fried chicken at Sideboard is to order a bucket, accompany it with a lemonade, and then carry it outside and eat it on a blanket on the small picnic lawn in front of the Lafayette restaurant, ideally with friends and some tunes on a Sonos. For the traditional fried chicken experience here by the Bay, Sideboard is it.
#3: Parada
For a departure from traditional American fried chicken, try out the chicken chicharrones from Parada, a trendy Peruvian joint in Walnut Creek. Parada’s chicken chicharrones are tiny, juicy nuggets of dark-meat chicken, coated in rice flour and fried in the traditional Peruvian style.
The chicharrones at Parada (or its sister restaurant Barranco in Lafayette and mother restaurant Mochica on Harrison Street in San Francisco) are accompanied by Peruvian dipping sauces made with flavors I struggle even to begin to describe. Wash it down with a pisco sour or pisco punch, which Parada makes beautifully.
No, this isn’t exactly your traditional Southern American fried chicken. But it’s every bit as good.
#4: Plucked
“Plucked Chicken & Beer”
This local restaurant chain’s name says it all. Who wouldn’t approve of that combo? (Well, aside from vegans, I guess). At its locations in Livermore, Pleasanton, and San Ramon (as well as “ghost” locations elsewhere in the Bay Area), Plucked offers fried chicken sandwiches in a variety of styles.
I love the traditional simplicity of their Basic Chick, but if you want something spicier and more complex, try their Buff Chick (which oozes with blue cheese and buffalo sauce) or the fiery Angry Chick, topped with pickled jalapenos and kimchi. Plucked also sells excellent traditional fried chicken (pictured), which they’ll deliver to you by the box via apps like Doordash.
And then there’s the beer. Plucked uses an innovative self-serve tap system, which charges you by how much you drink and allows you to sample beers from a variety of rotating microbreweries and big purveyors (check with your local Plucked to make sure this is available on the day of your visit, given the fluctuating restrictions on self-serve in our Covid-19 world).
Beer. Chicken. Dubious puns (“I pluck on the first date”, a sign at the restaurant screams). What could be better?
#5: Gotts
Gott’s Roadside, a well-known local chain with locations in San Francisco, the Napa Valley, and elsewhere in the Bay Area, has taken the concept of a traditional roadside joint and modernized it beautifully. Although it was founded in 1999, Gott’s feels like it’s been around forever. And it’s become such a staple of Bay Area life that it might as well have been.
In the spirit of updating traditional American fare, Gott’s offers a fried chicken sandwich, but with a different twist than you might expect. The sandwich features a fried chicken breast, but it’s flattened and fried in the style of German schnitzel, and then topped with harissa and turmeric, two staples of Middle Eastern cuisine.
Either way, it’s delicious and unique. For the vegan eater, Gott’s also offers a rotating special sandwich featuring fried tofu infused with pickle juice. It’s meatless but evokes the flavor of fried chicken and pickles. Either sandwich is a great bet.
#6: Angeline’s
For another slight variation on traditional American fried chicken, check out Angeline’s Louisiana Kitchen in Berkeley. The New Orleans style eatery offers Southern-style buttermilk fried chicken, but with a distinctly creole bent, served alongside ginger vanilla sweet potato mash or on top of a Po’ Boy sandwich.
For a total departure from fried chicken, keep an eye out for special days when the restaurant serves fried alligator. If America ever declares a Fried Alligator day, I’d support that, too.
#6: Proposition Chicken
Proposition Chicken has a proposition for you: Why not take the idea of fried chicken, break it down into its basic parts, and rebuild it however you’d like?
That’s the concept behind the eatery’s DIY menu. Guests choose either a Fried or Flipped Mary’s bird, and then opt for the chicken format of their choice: either a sandwich, salad, or an entrée with traditional fixings (a biscuit and salad). A variety of “provisions”, like brown sugar brussels sprouts and garlic thyme potato wedges, round out the menu.
Proposition Chicken also offers a chicken option which many San Franciscans will appreciate: Fake. The chain serves up crispy barbecued tofu as a stand-in for its chicken, and guests can customize their Fake chicken just as they would their traditional chicken, with the same format and provision choices.
Another surprising option? Gluten-free fried chicken. Proposition Chicken itself seems shocked to offer this one if their liberal use of exclamation points is any indicator. The menu entry for the dish reads “Available Gluten Free (Yes! Gluten-Free Fried Chicken!)”
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