Crawford County’s famous fried-chicken rivalry has been going on for over 80 years. The two eateries, Chicken Annie’s and Chicken Mary’s, have sat next to each other for decades – but the only side we’re picking is the one to go next to our plate of fried chicken.
The first thing that greets diners when they walk into Chicken Annie’s restaurant, near Pittsburg in southeast Kansas, is an actual rooster. Worry not—he’s taxidermy. But the glass-encased rooster is only the beginning of the fowl-related kitsch you’ll find in the restaurant’s dark paneled interior.
I suspect that most people don’t notice the decor for long, though, because the second thing that hits you is the smell. An almost religious aroma of salt and hot fat soak in the air, firing off a primal response in your brain: It’s time to sit down for some fried eats.
That tempting smell lingers throughout “chicken house row,” where Chicken Annie’s and Chicken Mary’s have sat side by side for decades. They’re both such institutions at this point that people often show up to meet companions for dinner at the wrong one, but, at over 91 years old this year, Annie’s was there first.
In 1934, Annie Pichler’s husband was disabled while working in the coal mines, which employed most of the men in the area at that time. With a family to feed, Annie turned her living room into a dining area and began serving chicken dinners to other miners to make ends meet.
Chicken Mary’s began about 8 years later, when Mary Zerngast’s husband, Joe, had a heart attack. Faced with difficulties similar to those Annie had dealt with a decade earlier, Mary followed her example and opened her home to serve chicken, sandwiches and sides to the local miners and their families.
According to Lana Brooks, who now helps manage Chicken Mary’s, that created quite a rivalry back in the day. Because families rarely went out to eat, each customer at one restaurant was necessarily one less customer at the other. They were direct competitors vying fiercely for business, and that meant being open at all hours. “It didn’t matter what time it was,” Brooks says. “You just knocked on the back door and Mary would wake up and feed you.”
The rivalry generally died down as the years passed, with the two families even intermarrying at one point (Annie’s grandson and Mary’s granddaughter, and yes, they own yet another local chicken house—Pichler’s Chicken Annie’s). But the family feud was rekindled just a few years ago when Annie’s and Mary’s faced off for an episode of the Travel Channel’s Food Wars program.
I feel sorry for those judges. Not only does eating at both places make a bellyful of fried chicken to digest, the differences between the food are almost indiscernible.
Both Annie’s and Mary’s offer similar sides, including German coleslaw, spaghetti, shoestring onion rings and German potato salad. Mary’s coleslaw has a slightly more pleasant vinegar-y pucker. Annie’s spaghetti has a touch more garlic. Mary’s onion rings are just a little crunchier and saltier. But the potato salad? It’s a complete toss-up.
Even the chicken begins with the exact same breadcrumbs. The local Frontenac Bakery makes a special sugar-free bread for both restaurants— sugar would make the chicken burn—which is then dried and ground up to form the base of the chicken breading.
Of course, what happens to the breadcrumbs once they arrive at each restaurant is a state secret. When I asked, our waitress at Annie’s cocked an eyebrow at me as if I were asking for the number to her bank account. Down the road at Mary’s, Brooks just laughed.
“It’s nothing magic,” she assured me. “Just basic salt, pepper and garlic type spices, but everyone does have their own special blend.”
She would slip me only one other small tip: The biggest difference between Chicken Annie’s and Chicken Mary’s is that Annie’s bathes the chicken in pure eggs before dipping it in breadcrumbs; Mary’s uses a mixture of eggs and milk. “That’s the way Mary did it, so that’s the way we do it,” Brooks said, adding that she suspects Mary did it that way because eggs were too expensive to use straight.
Whatever the reason behind it, the egg-and-milk dip gives Mary’s chicken just a little thicker crust, which I prefer—just the teensy, tiniest bit—over Annie’s. If you can hit only one place, begin with Mary’s, but be aware that there is a whole world of fried chicken to explore in southeast Kansas.
