Nothing about the appearance of the Cornish game hen at Blue Smoke screams, “I am the best thing you will eat today!” It looks a bit like a deflated football that somebody punctured with a pair of sticks and dragged through the mud.
In fact, in Blue Smoke’s attempt to bring together the barbecued game hen of Cozy Corner, in Memphis, with the fried hot chicken of places like Prince’s, in Nashville, the bird has been through a good deal more than that.
The process goes like this, approximately: spatchcocked, brined, rubbed with spices, smoked, chilled, dunked in a frothy batter, tossed in seasoned flour, deep fried, dipped in spicy oil and sprinkled with four kinds of ground pepper.
“Just a little pop-pop dust right on top” is how Jean-Paul Bourgeois, Blue Smoke’s chef, describes the last step. “That introduction of fresh chile onto that fried chicken, it just brings the zing.” Then came one final touch, he said: “a little swirlybird of Tabasco hot honey.”
Handily, this can all be shortened to smoked, fried hen when you order ($24 at the Battery Park City location and $26 on East 27th Street). But you’ll know there’s more to it when your jaw smashes through the dark crust with a sonic boom; when the particular forms of heat contributed by habanero, black pepper, Sichuan peppercorn, Aleppo pepper, cayenne and Tabasco sauce all start to pile up and reverberate like My Bloody Valentine guitar chords; when the meat gives up juices that swirl with wood smoke. This is, after all, a barbecue place.
Blue Smoke, 255 Vesey Street (North End Avenue), Battery Park City, 212-889-2005; and 116 East 27th Street (between Park Avenue South and Lexington Avenue), Kips Bay, 212-477-7733; bluesmoke.com.
