Howlin’ Ray’s

A Tennessee Tradition Finds Its West Coast Footing

Hot chicken is one of the most specific regional dishes in American cooking: a Nashville invention, built on lard-based cayenne paste applied to fried chicken at temperatures that transform the spice from a seasoning into a structural element of the dish. When that tradition travels, it almost always loses something in translation — the heat flattens, the crust softens, or the calibration between fat, acid, and capsaicin that makes a properly executed bird coherent falls apart. Los Angeles has produced one exception that the national food press has taken seriously. Howlin' Ray's, operating out of a counter inside Chinatown's Far East Plaza on North Broadway, has been ranked on Opinionated About Dining's Cheap Eats in North America list in consecutive years — #15 in 2023 and #20 in 2024 , and picked up a Pearl Recommended Restaurant designation in 2025. For a format that started as a regional American tradition with a very specific zip code, that kind of cross-country recognition matters.

The Counter at Far East Plaza

Far East Plaza sits inside a 1970s-era mall complex in Chinatown, a neighborhood that has spent the past decade absorbing a wave of restaurants and small food businesses drawn by lower rents and proximity to Downtown. The format at Howlin' Ray's is counter service inside the food hall: you approach, you order, you wait. The physical space does not work hard to impress. What generates atmosphere here is the queue itself, which on weekends extends well out of the building and has become one of the more discussed lines in the city. That kind of organic social proof is a reliable indicator in Los Angeles's casual dining tier , the city has enough options that consistent lines mean something concrete about the product.

Chef Johnny Ray Zone runs the kitchen. In Nashville hot chicken terms, the technique involves frying chicken to a finished state and then applying a spiced oil paste , heavy on cayenne, sometimes incorporating additional dried chiles , while the crust is still hot, so the fat absorbs into the exterior layer. The heat levels are calibrated into tiers, a convention the Nashville original Prince's Hot Chicken Shack established, and which every serious operation in the genre has adopted. The tiers matter because they determine whether the dish functions as food or as endurance sport. Getting the lower and middle tiers right , where the heat enhances rather than obliterates , is the actual craft challenge, and it is where the genre's better practitioners separate from casual attempts.

Nashville Technique, Los Angeles Context

The editorial angle on Howlin' Ray's is less about the venue itself and more about what happens when a tightly defined regional American technique lands in a city with no inherited ownership of the tradition. Los Angeles has processed dozens of imported food formats in the past two decades , Korean barbecue, Japanese ramen, Sichuan ma la, Yucatecan cochinita , and the city's particular contribution tends to be access to exceptional local produce and a consumer base accustomed to reading genre signals across cuisines. Hot chicken does not have the ingredient complexity of those formats. The technique is the entire point: fat management, spice paste composition, heat tier calibration, and crust integrity. What a Los Angeles operation like Howlin' Ray's brings to the format is not a local ingredient palette but a different kind of rigor , the pressure of performing a borrowed tradition accurately enough to earn recognition from evaluators who know the Nashville source.

That comparison set matters when placing Howlin' Ray's alongside the city's other serious cheap eats. The OAD Cheap Eats ranking it appears on includes operations across the full range of American regional and global cuisines. Holding a position in the leading twenty, as it did in 2023, in that company is a signal about execution quality rather than novelty. The Nashville tradition has its own reference points: Bolton's Spicy Chicken & Fish in Nashville and Gus's World Famous Chicken in Memphis represent the Southern originals against which any serious West Coast operation is implicitly measured. Howlin' Ray's has also drawn comparisons to Dave's Hot Chicken, the other major Los Angeles hot chicken operation, though the two sit in different tiers of critical recognition and physical format.

Los Angeles as a Dining City in 2025

The range in Los Angeles dining runs from counter operations earning OAD recognition to Michelin-starred rooms with decade-long waiting lists. Providence, the city's sustained two-star seafood destination, and Kato, which has earned one Michelin star for its New Taiwanese tasting menu format, sit at the opposite end of the price and format spectrum from Howlin' Ray's. Somni and Osteria Mozza occupy different positions across the city's mid-to-upper register. The point is that Howlin' Ray's recognition arrives in a market where the competition for critical attention is genuine and the evaluators are applying consistent standards across formats. Cheap eats recognition in Los Angeles is not a consolation category , it is its own tier of serious evaluation. For a broader map of where the city's dining sits, our full Los Angeles restaurants guide covers the range in detail. You can also explore hotels, bars, wineries, and experiences across the city through the EP Club guides.

Nationally, the hot chicken format now appears in markets from Chicago (Alinea occupies a different culinary register entirely, but the city's casual tier has absorbed the format) to New York, where Le Bernardin represents the opposite pole of American dining ambition. The spread of hot chicken from Nashville to national menus in the 2010s follows the same pattern as earlier American regional exports: initial resistance from purists, eventual recognition that the leading transplants can honor the technique while adapting to new contexts. Howlin' Ray's OAD trajectory , appearing on the list and maintaining presence across multiple years , suggests it has cleared that bar. Other high-caliber American dining experiences, from Lazy Bear in San Francisco to Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg and The French Laundry in Napa, demonstrate how seriously the West Coast takes culinary craft across all price points. Emeril's in New Orleans is another reference for understanding how American regional cooking earns national recognition over time.

Planning Your Visit

Address: 727 N Broadway #128, Los Angeles, CA 90012 (Far East Plaza, Chinatown). Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 11am to 7pm; closed Monday and Tuesday. Reservations: Counter service only; no reservations. Arrive early on weekends to minimize wait time, as queues form quickly after opening. Recognition: Pearl Recommended (2025); OAD Cheap Eats North America #20 (2024), #15 (2023). Google rating: 4.7 across 4,070 reviews.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I eat at Howlin' Ray's?

The format is Nashville hot chicken, which means the decision is primarily about heat tier rather than dish selection. The technique , developed under chef Johnny Ray Zone , follows the Nashville convention of applying a cayenne-heavy spiced oil paste to freshly fried chicken, with heat levels ranging from mild through to the upper registers that the format is known for nationally. Start at a middle tier if you are new to the format; the lower tiers are where the craft of fat and spice integration is most legible. The OAD cheap eats recognition in both 2023 and 2024, along with the 2025 Pearl recommendation and a 4.7 Google rating from over 4,000 reviews, reflects consistent execution across the menu rather than a single standout item. The chicken sandwich and bone-in pieces are the two primary formats, both using the same spice paste application.