Upstate New York’s Most Iconic Dish Is Called City Chicken, and the Story Behind It Will Surprise You

City chicken is one of those dishes that sounds completely straightforward... until you find out there’s no chicken in it.

I’ll never forget my first experience with city chicken. There was an adorable little spot on Robinson Street in Binghamton called Czech Pleez, which sadly has since closed, and I stumbled in during Binghamton Restaurant Week many years ago.

While I love bold spice and flavor, I’m not particularly adventurous when it comes to meat. If it’s not chicken, pork, beef, or turkey, it simply isn’t making it onto my plate. I scanned the menu and landed on city chicken, figuring I couldn’t go wrong.

I Ate Something Called City Chicken, and It Wasn’t Even Chicken

I was right, or so I thought. It was one of the most amazing things I’d ever tasted, and I couldn’t stop raving about it. Mid-blabber, my friend looked at me and said, “You know that’s not chicken, right?

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My jaw dropped. Every possibility of what kind of meat I'd just happily shoved into my mouth ran through my head as I fought back a gag. The restaurant owner stepped in and told me it was pork. The look of relief on my face must have been something, because he promptly burst out laughing.

Why Is It Called City Chicken If There's No Chicken In It?

Most people outside of Upstate New York, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh have never even heard of city chicken. And the ones who have almost always want to know the same thing: why is it called city chicken if there’s no chicken in it? Where did it come from, and what is it actually made of?

According to the National Chicken Council, people didn’t eat chicken the way we do today until the early 1900s. Back then, chickens were raised almost entirely for their eggs, not their meat.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that people began eating chicken for its meat, and even then, the idea didn’t fully catch on until the 1940s. Chicken made a remarkable journey from something rarely eaten to a luxury only the wealthy could afford, to a staple found on tables at every level of society.

How Polish and Ukrainian Immigrants Created One of the Most Misunderstood Dishes

City chicken is a dish that came to life thanks to Polish and Ukrainian communities who settled in the Great Lakes region at the start of the Great Depression. Traditional city chicken is made with cubes of pork, veal, or a combination of both, which are threaded onto skewers, battered with flour and breadcrumbs, and then either baked or deep-fried until perfectly tender. Often, the meat is shaped into the form of a chicken leg.

Pork and veal were the meats of choice simply because they were more affordable and more readily available. As Barbara Johnstone, a professor of rhetoric and linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, explained to Eater, "It was called ‘chicken’ because chicken was once more expensive and more desirable; families would have a chicken for Sunday dinner."

The Upstate New York City That Gave This Iconic Dish Its Name

Fun fact: it was actually Binghamton that gave city chicken its name. A 1926 Binghamton newspaper article called the dish “city chicken,” and it stuck, and it has been called that ever since (although your Polish or Ukrainian grandmother, who called it patyczki or patychky, would probably roll her eyes).

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Not bad for a dish that doesn’t even contain the ingredient it’s named after. Next time someone orders city chicken, you’ll know exactly what’s on that skewer, along with the whole Depression-era story behind it.