Chicken and waffles has been a Pittsburgh staple since the 1800s

Pittsburgh’s early 20 th century roadhouses had lots to offer: bootleg booze, music, dancing, chances for illicit sex, and food. One of the most popular menu items, chicken and waffles, straddled the line between breakfast and dinner food. Swanky downtown nightclubs and rural roadhouses served the dish that divided foodies long before the word “foodie” was even coined.  “Chicken and waffles is an unhappy business,” wrote the editors of American Cookery magazine in 1925. Their beef with the dish was that it lacked essential ingredients and taste. “Though its flavors differ, they are too much on the same plane, like ill-chosen flowers in a bouquet, or badly combined tints in room decoration.” Food snobbery aside, why was chicken and waffles so popular? Was the menu item a relic of early Pennsylvania immigrant culture or a crossover food from Black Harlem? And how did it end up a 21 st century hipster brunch staple? Pittsburgh City Paper went looking for answers and found lots to chew on. Swank downtown dining rooms like the one in Horne’s department store offered chicken and waffles. This ad published in the Pittsburgh Daily Post Jan. 23, 1905, described chicken and waffles as the centerpiece to its Dixie-Land dinner. Credit: Via newspapers.com Aside from the big question of whether combining savory chicken with sweet waffles is appropriate, food writers and historians have been pecking at the dish’s history for decades. Some situate its history in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Others, like food writer Adrian Miller , look to eastern Pennsylvania. “I have a very unpopular take on this within the Black community because I locate chicken and waffles in Amish country,” Miller says. “My theory is that the dish goes to Philadelphia and becomes very popular around the end of the 1790s.” The award-winning soul food scholar has caught lots of flak for his position because, for a long time, chicken and waffles has been