By Adam Chandler | Photography by Camille Delaune for WSJ
The fried chicken sandwich at Pecking House in New York is not your average sandwich. Featuring a chicken thigh brined in buttermilk, MSG and five-spice powder before being fried twice and dunked in chili oil laced with duck fat, the dish has been anointed as one of the city's best by the likes of Bon Appétit and Eater.
It's also a testament to bygone stigmas and ascendant trends in American dining.
It wasn't all that long ago that dark meat was unpopular across certain swaths of American culinary culture, owing to popular misconceptions about its healthiness, cleanliness and quality.
Now, "people are eating more chicken thighs -- for protein, for flavor, and for economical reasons," said Chef Eric Huang, Pecking House's founder and a former Eleven Madison Park sous-chef. "It's juicy, it's delicious, it has a really great texture, it's just logistically a little more forgiving."
Back in 2007, even as the average American ate chicken about nine times a month, only two of those instances involved dark meat at all, according to an annual industry study conducted by the National Chicken Council.
For decades, chicken thighs rated so low in the national pecking order that U.S. poultry producers unloaded much of their dark-meat yield to hungry markets abroad in Russia, Mexico, and across Asia. All the while, chefs, culinary historians and industry observers were pleading for Americans to embrace poultry's dark side.
"Enough is enough," the late Josh Ozersky wrote in one cri de cuisse in 2011. "The time has come to get with the dark-meat program. The boneless thigh may be the most perfect piece of meat or poultry imaginable."
In recent years, American diners have finally taken full stock of the dark-meat cut. Thanks to a four-piece combo involving immigration from regions that embrace dark meat, along with evolving culinary culture, economic forces and technological advances, chicken thighs are ubiquitous. In salads, bowls and burritos from high-price fast-casual outfits like Sweetgreen, Cava and Chipotle. In the styrofoam boxes of New York's halal carts and the cast-iron dishware of its trendiest restaurants. In a surreal moment in recent dark-meat history, the popular chicken-wing chain Wingstop introduced a virtual concept dubbed, well, Thighstop.
Even ground chicken, which is primarily made of dark meat, has seen a sales surge, with Circana reporting a 23.1% yearly increase in November.
Chicken thighs are roosting in recipes from high-end wellness resorts for top spenders and in the grocery carts of average consumers who are increasingly steering toward poultry because of record-high beef prices in recent months. In an earnings call last month, the chief executive of Pilgrim's Pride, the second-largest poultry producer in the U.S., said that "boneless dark meat volumes are growing at double-digit rates" across the entire food-service industry.
Among restaurateurs and poultry producers, this development represents an enormous cultural shift. "For years, the stigma largely centered around health perceptions," Robert O'Brien, the head chef of Popeyes, wrote in an email. "White meat was marketed as leaner and therefore 'better for you,' and that messaging stuck."
The wisdom around white meat's superiority emerged not just from henhouse superstition and a misperception of cleanliness owing to darker meat's color, but also from a medical establishment that associated dark meat with higher fat and calories more than flavor. In 1994, guidelines set by the Food and Drug Administration limited which foods could be labeled "healthy" based partially on their fat content.
In both grocery aisles and the public consciousness, items such as avocados and almonds were deemed too fatty to be "healthy," while Cocoa Puffs and Pop-Tarts technically qualified.
Ironically, heavily processed and oddly shaped chicken patties, tenders and nuggets were popular so long as they claimed to contain 100% white meat. McDonald's, for example, rolled out their white-meat McNuggets with considerable fanfare in late 2003 and saw a significant sales bump.
As the American consensus on nutrition evolved, production techniques advanced in ways that primed chicken thighs for the American masses.
Machines built to debone chicken breasts were eventually modified to debone dark-meat pieces, which gave less of a visual shock to finicky consumers, who tend to prefer that meat not resemble an actual animal even on food labels, according to a study by the U.K. Government Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Or, as the writer John Updike once confessed, "I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburgers and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing."
It certainly also helps that chicken thighs, by wide acclaim, are more difficult to cluck up in the kitchen. Both Chefs Huang and O'Brien described the cut as "more forgiving" than white meat, which has made it popular among professional chefs and featherweight home cooks alike. "You really can cook well past like 190deg, maybe 200deg, and it's still really great," Huang argued. "Personally, as a chef, I love seeing thighs get their moment,"
"They've always been a workhorse in professional kitchens," O'Brien added, "because of their depth of flavor and versatility."
Of course, chicken thighs and dark meat in general have been a celebrated ingredient of American cooking and foodways for centuries, including in Southern and Black American traditions.
But, according to both trend reports and poultry-industry executives, the recent rise of chicken thighs can also be attributed to the increase in Asian and Hispanic populations, who have been the fastest-growing demographic groups in the U.S. for decades, and for whom chicken thighs are a more central culinary fixture. As a result, even bone-in dark meat prices have gained "a whopping 93% increase from the average just five years prior," as one industry publication noted in January.
"The example I always use is when I was growing up, my Korean friends were teased ruthlessly about kimchi and their kimchi fridges, and how the houses smelled," Huang said. "And now kimchi is at Whole Foods."
Places where dark meat had been overlooked are finally seeing the light. O'Brien, a 17-year veteran of Popeyes, explained that the company has "seen strong demand in regions where dark meat historically wasn't as dominant," specifically noting the Midwest and Northeast as areas where "white meat used to be the default preference."
For the chicken-thigh devotees, it's poultry in motion.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 19, 2026 12:27 ET (16:27 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
