Our Story
Wonderland Chicken Co was born of our own love for food. In 2019 we had stumbled upon a Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich at a small brewery in Portland Oregon. After trying their interpretation of it we became obsessed and struck out to replicate it on our own. During this process we started doing the research into where the Nashville Hot started and how it has changed over the years.
We ultimately wanted to stay true in spirit to the restaurant that started it all, Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville. The traditional way to serve hot chicken is a couple pieces of dark meat chicken served on a piece of white bread with some pickle chips on top. Well, our kids didn’t much like bone in chicken at the time and being as poor as we were we ate a lot of boneless skinless chicken thighs so that was going to be our cut of chicken.
Also, at the time we were playing with a lot of fusion taco recipes and making a lot of different variations of slaw, so the now famous pickle slaw was born. Then finally, after 6 months of playing with seasonings, our variation of the Nashville Hot was born.
Fast forward a year and our life in the Willamette Valley was being pulled from under us. It was the middle of the pandemic, my hours doing kitchen remodels were being cut. My wife was steadily hating her job more and more. Can you blame her, working at a call center for a major cellular provider, and getting yelled at by irate customers all day. Plus, the cherry on top was when our landlord died, and his daughter decided that she was going to sell the house we lived in and gave us 60 days to move out. So, we decided to move our little family of four into a 26’ RV on my mother-in-law’s property in Sisters. If you’ve never lived in an RV with 2 kids and 2 dogs, I recommend not doing it. Things were cramped, patience was thin, but we were all there together and ultimately that’s all that mattered
I initially started working for a family friend doing construction again, but as winter rolled on, the work slowly faded. Come January we had a little savings left and after years of talking about starting a food cart we spent $1,700 of our $2,000 savings on an older flatbed trailer. After that purchase everything became so much more real. We were going to do this. Every week after that we would buy as much lumber as we could and started building our first food cart from the ground up. After 90 days we were done. Every board, nail and screw were cut and driven by us. All the electrical, plumbing and propane was run by us.
Finally on April 29, 2021, we were ready to open. Thankfully everyone thought our food was as good as we did. There were so many things that we had to figure out, it had been years since I personally worked in a kitchen, and Autumn never had. Thanks to the support of all our customers, friends and family we have been successful. There has been plenty of long days and longer weeks, but there is no greater satisfaction then all y’all’s smiling faces after enjoying our food.