Barberton chicken
serbian-American fried chicken dish
Barberton chicken, also known as Serbian fried chicken, is a style of fried chicken native to the city of Barberton in Summit County, Ohio. It is a distinctive Serbian-American style served in several mainly Serbian-owned restaurants in Barberton and nearby Norton and increasingly in other surrounding communities. The style of chicken has given the town national recognition, with some proclaiming Barberton to be the "Chicken Capital of the World" or the "Fried Chicken Capital of America."
History
Barberton chicken began with Michael and Smilka Topalsky, Serbian immigrants who arrived to America at the turn of the 20th century. Like many during the Great Depression, they became burdened with debt and were forced to sell their family farm. They opened a restaurant called Belgrade Gardens in 1933 in which they sold a distinctive style of fried chicken, along with a vinegar-based cabbage cole slaw, a rice and tomato sauce side dish seasoned with hot peppers (usually referred to as "hot sauce" or "hot rice", which can also be eaten as a dipping sauce or a side dish), and freshly cut french fries. Barberton lore holds that these were exact replicas of what the Topalskys had known back in Serbia as pohovana piletina, kupus salata, djuvec, and pomfrit.
Soon other restaurants emerged which copied the distinctive style. Helen DeVore, who had worked for Belgrade Gardens, opened up Hopocan Gardens in 1946. White House Chicken Dinners was founded in 1950 by the Pavkov family, who owned the restaurant until the late 1980s when they sold it to the DeVore family. The Serbian-American Milich family opened Milich's Village Inn, in 1955.
“Barberton chicken” enters the record as serbian-American fried chicken dish. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Barberton, chicken and serbian-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barberton chicken” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.