photo: clayton hauck

You want this fried chicken. So does everybody else. Good thing they're serving up 200 pounds of it a night.

Parson’s Chicken & Fish (2952 W. Armitage, 773-384-3333), the new beard-friendly fried chicken and fish joint from some of the minds behind Longman & Eagle, presents highbrow and lowbrow merged into one unibrow. To the about 40 seats inside and 130 outside, the no-reservations spot offers a menu divided into raw, fresh, and fried sections. Chef Hunter Moore (Café Lula, Girl & the Goat) told us about some of the items:

• His fried chicken, the heart and soul and giblets of the menu, is brined and then dredged in buttermilk, hot sauce, and seasoned flour. Moore says they went through 200 pounds of chicken a night on their opening weekend.

• Also at home in the fried section are fish, hushpuppies filled with ham and cream cheese, and salt cod fritters.

• Raising the overall-brow on the raw menu, yellowfin tuna poke comes cut into little squares and tossed with soy, lime, cilantro, Fresno chiles, morita chiles, radishes, cucumbers, and red onion.

• A shaved salad consists probably entirely of ingredients that have never seen the inside of an average chicken-and-fish stand: arugula, asparagus, turnips, fava beans, radishes, and Champagne vinaigrette. 

• And back to state-fair fare, a traditional funnel cake is served with brown butter pastry cream.

Given that about three-quarters of the seating at Parson’s depends on cooperative weather, Moore says the ownership plans to knock out a wall and add 40 indoor seats by building out the current building to the east. “We were considering expanding before we opened,” he says.