Pecking House, the fried chicken pop-up that once had a waitlist just shy of 10,000 people, opens its permanent home at 244 Flatbush Avenue, on the corner of Saint Marks Avenue, on September 9. The Park Slope restaurant is the first from Eric Huang, a Taiwanese American chef who cut his teeth at Eleven Madison Park before launching the business out of his family’s restaurant in Fresh Meadows during the pandemic. “Kind of like the Bear,” he says, nodding to the hit Hulu television show with an uncanny resemblance to his own life. He’s been running the pop-up with Maya Ferrante, a former chef at the Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern, where the pair met in 2015, and one of Pecking House’s earliest customers.
Huang and Ferrante are opening the Brooklyn restaurant after a two-year pop-up run that took them to three boroughs, four restaurants, and the depths of a Lower East Side food hall. Customers have learned to line up early, suggesting that this city’s appetite for fried chicken seasoned with Sichuan peppercorns, Tianjin chiles, sugar, and MSG may just be beginning. “It’s something that’s never really existed before,” Huang says, a response he’s offered in various interviews over the last two years. He’s noisily dissecting a whole chicken into nine parts in the background of our call. A few minutes later, he’s interrupted by one that starts to sizzle in the fryer. Maybe that’s just it. By now, this chicken mostly speaks for itself.
Read on for more about Pecking House and take a look at the menu below.
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Pecking House is open Wednesday to Sunday from 5 to 10 p.m. The restaurant will open for breakfast and lunch soon, with daily service to follow.