How Eric Huang of Pecking House Turned Fried Chicken into One of the Most Desired Pandemic Foods

Reporting by Kat Odell

There aren’t many success stories that came out of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in the hospitality world, an industry that was especially hard hit by the worldwide lockdown. But chef Eric Huang of Fresh Meadow’s Pecking House, and his addictive, Sichuan peppercorn-flecked fried chicken that commanded a wait list of 8,400 hungry diners, is one of the few.

During the pandemic, and after spending four years at New York’s Eleven Madison Park––a local fine dining institution that, at its peak, was crowned best restaurant in the world by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants organization––Huang took over his uncle’s Queens-based restaurant Peking House, and from that kitchen he launched a delivery-only Sichuan fried chicken concept.

“I was very fortunate to hit an exact window in which New Yorkers were being corralled back into their apartments, and they had thoroughly exhausted all of their delivery and cooking options,” explains Huang. He describes the experience as “frantically chaotic,” and for an extended period of time when he launched, he was Pecking House’s singular employee. Huang says that he had to buy his ingredients from grocery stores because wholesalers wouldn’t deliver to him, meanwhile he cooked, took phone calls, managed the waitlist, organized all the deliveries, delivered all the chickens, and at the end of the night he came back to clean the restaurant “after driving around the city with Mario Kart-like urgency and aggressiveness.”

Fast forward to today, and while the demand for delivery fried chicken has dropped a bit––though Huang still has 3,500 people on his wait list––the chef has been able to grow his business. Over the summer he added in-person dining, and expanded his menu.

Huang describes his food as “Approachable cuisine that exists at the intersection of an Asian-American upbringing,” which encompasses bird-focused options like a fried chicken thigh sandwich with soy caramel and charred cabbage, and chicken wings with paprika and a citrus butter sauce.

But the standout dish, and the one that earned him thousands of eager diners, is his super crunchy and epically juicy Sichuan peppercorn fried chicken. “It is fairly unique because there aren't a lot of chefs who grow up eating a ton of KFC and also Taiwanese fried chicken and also Sichuan hot pot,” states Huang, who adds that the rest of his menu “follows suit, taking inspiration from Cajun and Southern cuisine interpreted through the lens of a chef who grew up in a Chinese restaurant.”

Below, we caught up with Huang to chat all things fried chicken, what it was like to launch a business during a pandemic, and his plans for the future.

Who is your mentor? Alex Lee, legendary New York City chef of Restaurant Daniel, modern fine dining pioneer, and good friend. He completely embodies the traditional chef's journey of backbreaking unpaid work in world-renowned restaurants and decades upon decades of unerring passion. I read a book called The Fourth Star that chronicled Restaurant Daniel's pursuit of a perfect New York Times rating, and it put a heavy emphasis on the detail of chef Alex's work and leadership. It was a huge inspiration to me as a young cook that there was an Asian-American chef in charge of one of the world's best kitchens. He lived in Long Island after leaving the Dinex group, and he happened to come into my family's restaurant while I was working there. I happened to be reading the Lucky Peach article by Francis Lam about him at that very moment, a truly unbelievable cinema-like moment.

What was it like working at Eleven Madison Park? No cook embarks on a journey to a three Michelin star restaurant thinking it's going to be a fun time and an easy path. At least no sane or informed cook does. But working at that level for the first time showed me an intensity, dedication, and work ethic that far surpassed even my biggest fears.

How did you get through it? I tried to live by the motto that, if you didn't feel like quitting, you weren't pushing yourself hard enough, and that was largely true in so many ways. Of course, there were many times that I considered it to be too much and that I couldn't carry on. But I'm grateful I did, and it gave me a toughness and a confidence that no one can ever take away from me.

What was your biggest takeaway? I think chefs and the media can get obsessive about cooking techniques and ideas that a chef takes away from the kitchens they work in, but honestly it is the logistical and organizational skills that feel most relevant and powerful to me now.

What inspired you to start Pecking House? I had spent the first half of the pandemic working at my mother's restaurant on Long Island, Pearl East, helping her keep the kitchen afloat and learning to be an on-the-fly dim sum chef. It was insanely busy––If anything, she seemed to be doing even more business in a lockdown. Eventually her chefs returned to work and I was exhausted by the idea of going back there to have more bodies to bump into. My cousin just happened to mention that Peking House had been closed since the lockdown started in March. He suggested an idea of maybe doing some experimenting and we got to toying around. The idea of an empty kitchen entirely to myself was the main allure, but the goal had always been to make enough to pay the rent, and so we set about testing some recipes that may work.

Tell me about that waitlist…

We were so lucky to never have to worry about demand because we had a rolling rhythm of press hits, and no shortage of hungry New Yorkers in the cold months. After the Time Out press hit, my Instagram inbox was suddenly flooded with 700-800 requests for orders. That eventually became an 8,400 order waitlist. In the beginning, I was the only employee, and there was no way I was going to be able to meet that demand on my own. I have extremely limited technological proficiency and the crude website I built had a password function. I used that as a means of being able to control the ordering process. I tried to get rid of it as soon as I could, but I started hearing that people found it rather fun and whimsical, so here we are!

When did you decide to start serving food in person? As New Yorkers took this summer to flee the city in what may be their last true work-from-home opportunity, the demand for a high-end fried chicken meal delivered to your door began to dwindle a bit. We had the incredible benefit of having a huge waitlist to tap into, but there was definitely a sizable change to our flow and volume. So, we decided to use the opportunity to try to capture some semblance of outdoor dining, and use it as an opportunity to test out new dishes that we weren't confident would travel as well as our chili fried chicken.

Tell me about what makes your chicken special? There’s this ultra-crispy, light Taiwanese popcorn chicken perfumed with five-spice. That's a style I loved and continue to love to eat. And then there's this meaty, on-the-bone, crunchy American country-style fried chicken that has heft and substance, and instead of one-bite morsels you're taking big, two-handed bites with the expectation there will be rivulets of grease running down your chin. Add in a Nashville hot and Sichuan ma la collaboration, and you have Pecking House Chili Fried Chicken! It's genuinely something I think is unique, and is an idea that only could have gestated in the brain of someone who grew up eating and cooking both American and Chinese foods in great quantities.

How do you make it? Whole, air-chilled chickens are cut into a traditional 10-cut break with the bone. We take great care to keep the skin in good condition. The pieces are then marinated in buttermilk, spices, and mustard. The chicken is then dredged in a flour-potato starch-corn starch mix and twice-fried. Upon finishing the second fry, the chicken is brushed with a paste of Tianjin chilis and Sichuan peppercorns that is bound with smoked duck fat.

Are you still delivering and is there still a waitlist? We are very much still delivering! The demand for delivery has slowed down a bit, but we deliver to almost all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens five days a week. Our waitlist is currently around 3,500 people and we get 30 to 50 new additions per day. I don't love the waitlist system. I understand the optics of its pretentiousness are troublesome, but we have no other means of controlling the volume otherwise! We have a quirky business model that shuns third-party delivery apps, but we believe this allows us to pay our team an above-market rate. All tips and delivery fees go to the drivers and we believe the cooks are given a wage and lifestyle balance that is very rarely seen in the restaurant industry. After the major inflection point that was the pandemic, it would be a shame to go back and do things exactly the same way. We hope to come out of this with a fresh start in trying to shift how restaurants operate.

What are your plans for the future? We have been aggressively pursuing our own "coop," if you will, since February. We hope to be in a Brooklyn neighborhood soon and let this thing grow. If Pecking House does well enough to warrant its growth into multiple storefronts, then that would be fantastic. But if not, I personally have many fast casual restaurant ideas I would love to explore as well. The tweezers have been put away, maybe not for good, but for a long while it would seem.

Get on the waitlist here.