Filling up on fried chicken. Convenience chains emerge as favorite source of Southern food

There is no such thing as gas station food.

In your heart, you know that’s wrong. But the convenience store sector wants customers to realize its members aren’t fixated on fossil fuel, so the official industry stance is retailers who sell anything that can’t be classified as automotive — even if it’s just lottery tickets and bubblegum — are in the c-store business.

Patrick Parker, owner of Parker’s Convenience Stores, an 11-store chain clustered around Brunswick, Georgia, sometimes has to remind his own employees as much.

“I had a young lady who worked here, and she’d say, ‘I love your gas stations,’” he recalled. “But she’s 24. How would she know what a gas station is? A gas station is where they fix your tire, clean your window, and sell you a battery if you need one. We all did that in the ‘70s. But if you start frying food, it’s a convenience store.”

And boy, are places with gas pumps frying food. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores, foodservice has emerged as the leading source of inside sales, overtaking “Cokes and smokes,” with prepared food accounting for 16 percent of total convenience store revenue. NACS spokesman Jeff Lenard thinks that share stands to grow, citing the advantages that c-stores have over fast-food restaurants, in addition to omnipresence.

“It can be as fast or faster, and you can come up with hundreds of combo meals,” he said. “Your beverage can be an energy drink; your side can be a candy bar, pretzels, nuts or a banana.”

As for the main course, c-stores are experimenting with everything from avocado toast to sushi, but fried chicken remains the crown jewel of food programs. 7-Eleven and Love’s Travel Stops are among the major chains which have introduced branded fried chicken in the past few years.

Still, it’s the fast-growing chains with Southeastern headquarters—including Spinx, based in Greenville, South Carolina, Enmarket and Parker’s Kitchen, both based in Savannah, and Charleston’s Refuel, which in 2020 purchased Mississippi’s Double Quick — which appear best positioned to scale the genre for a larger audience.

After all, folks here know something about gas station food.

“I don’t want to slight other regions,” Lenard said with the diplomacy of a professional publicist. “But the area of the country that most embraces convenience stores is the Southeast.”

When Lenard looks at the c-store map, he sees already-occupied land in the Northeast, low-mileage commutes in the Midwest, and fast-food brand loyalty in California.

By contrast, “the Southeast is an open road car culture, as opposed to a traffic jam, and people have an affinity for convenience stores. They embrace it, and there are a lot of good operators pushing the envelope of what’s possible.”

North Carolina photojournalist Kate Medley is working on a book about those independent roadside entrepreneurs across the South, some of whom are so locally renowned for providing homecooked food and a community gathering place that they long ago ripped out their gas pumps or let them run dry. Her work builds on a documentary project she did in the Mississippi Delta.

“I went in with this idea that maybe with gas stations having a low barrier to entry, and a reliable steady clientele, maybe some of the most innovative food in the South was happening in the backs of gas stations,” Medley said. “And I found that absolutely, 1,000 percent not to be the case.”

Beyond big cities and interstate exits, where owners know long-haul truckers born in Southeast Asia are likely to stop for a meal, the standard Southern convenience store menu is “fried chicken, burgers and potato logs.”

“The reality is they can’t afford not to serve that,” Medley continued. “They can’t afford not to sell Hunt Brothers Pizza. I stopped at one of these places in Louisiana that makes their own boudin, but they’re selling hundreds of Hunt pizzas a day.”

Stafford Shurden, a restaurant owner and farmer in Drew, Mississippi, allows “it’s frankly decent pizza for eight bucks.” But it was fried chicken which inspired his first gas station food review in 2020; he’s since uploaded 147 review videos to his popular YouTube channel.

“We started doing this tongue-in-cheek social media campaign where I went around and compared other people’s fried chicken to ours,” Shurden said. “Then it got to be I was having a real impact on these gas stations, so the motive changed a bit. I’ve driven my truck 1,100 miles.”

Shurden was driving a tractor when he spoke to The Food Section, sowing this year’s soybeans. So, he’s not just theorizing when he says of rural Mississippi gas station steam tables, “What’s the tractor driver going to do? He’s not coming back for lunch. Three-compartment fried chicken holds very well for the consumer.”

After about a decade of running gas stations, Patrick Parker in 1984 opened a Ludowici, Georgia, store where customers could get fried chicken.

“It did really well,” Parker said. “Then we quickly realized you needed green beans and collard greens and squash to go with it. But it’s the South: It’s easier to find a cook than someone who can run the register.”

Unlike the mom-and-pop stores that Shurden favors, Parker’s Convenience Stores don’t double as post offices or keep tables permanently reserved for the last living World War II veterans. But the company’s approach to food preparation isn’t too far removed from the backroad formula. Namely, cooks adjust recipes to please their patrons, many of whom eat at Parker’s every day.

“We let them be creative,” Parker said. “The processes and safety are very regulated, and very controlled, but we want to create dishes that are flavorful.”

For example, “In a really buttoned-down environment, green beans wouldn’t have bacon in them, because bacon costs more, but the lady cooking said, ‘I want to fry bacon and put it in green beans.’ Well, yeah, that sounds good. Let’s do that.”

Parker’s brother, Greg, is the founder and owner of Parker’s Kitchen, the definition of a buttoned-down operation. Named Convenience Store Chain of the Year in 2020, Parker’s Kitchen is fully invested in its online app, self-checkout stations, and “a proprietary business intelligence system that aggregates weather and traffic data” to make sure biscuits aren’t baked hours before customers want them.

Otherwise, its food is still relatively low-tech. Prep cooks slice whole potatoes for wedges, and spokeswoman Heather Davis says Parker’s won’t mess with frozen chicken.

“Our core item is the chicken tender,” she said. “Everything revolves around it. If it takes away from our ability to execute the tender, we don’t do it.”

There are now 74 Parker’s Kitchen locations, but as Davis said, “We’re opening like crazy.” Between the time I started reporting the story and sat down to write it, a Parker’s Kitchen opened down the street from my house.

And wherever Parker’s Kitchen opens, its fried chicken seems to win over fans. When I met up with a few food cognoscenti in Savannah, and the topic of local fried chicken came up, the consensus was that it’s tough to beat Parker’s. Not long thereafter, while eating at a venerable Southern buffet about 200 miles up the coast, I heard another diner say to her friend, “But have you tried the fried chicken at Parker’s?”

“It’s some of the best fried chicken I’ve had,” chef David Thomas, founder of Ida B’s Table, told Garden & Gun in January.

The crunchy fried chicken is excellent, but my favorite item is the fried okra, sporting a greaseless, gossamer crust. The okra is always sturdy and springtime green, and tastes to me like a worthy homage to a Southern food tradition.

Much as barbecue joints spawned Dickey’s and meat-and-threes inspired Cracker Barrel, it’s time for gas station food to extend its reach beyond the region. Here’s hoping these multiplying c-store chains continue to do right by it — and, at least in the case of Parker’s Kitchen, keep gizzards on the menu.

This story first appeared in The Food Section, a Charleston-based newsletter covering food and drink across the American South. To learn more about the James Beard Award-winning publication, visit thefoodsection.substack.com.