Two of Marcus Spears’ passions in life are food and football. The ESPN analyst is combining those in an interesting way this year, working with Louisiana Fish Fry for the Louisiana Fried Chicken Sandwich Contest. The contest saw home cooks’ chicken sandwich recipes featured at six regional events across the U.S., with the winner of each regional event heading to New York last month for the finals, and the winner of the overall contest (Atlanta’s Mindea Pituk) taking home a golden skillet, getting a trip to New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX this February, and joining Spears as the company’s “VP of Fried Chicken” for a year.
Spears spoke to AA on this Louisiana Fish Fry contest around the finals. He said he loved the opportunity to be involved with something combining food, football, and his home state of Louisiana.
“It’s beautiful. Again, it’s food, and we know with anything in New Orleans, if food is not involved, people are not going to show up. I think it was just perfect timing. Obviously, there’s Louisiana roots for the Louisiana Fish Fry company, so the Louisiana Fried Chicken Sandwich challenge, with the word Louisiana in it and the Super Bowl in New Orleans, it’s so ingrained into the coverage.
“And with what I’ve been doing at ESPN, it was just a great synergy opportunity. You very rarely get opportunities to take advantage of what’s the biggest event in the world, in my opinion, and to also infuse something that’s near and dear to you. So it just worked out perfectly.”
He said the chicken sandwich contest grew out of his other work with Louisiana Fish Fry, where he’s the “Chief Fry Officer.” Spears said the company’s dive into chicken seasoning brought up the idea of home cooks’ chicken sandwiches, and that led to this contest taking off.
“My relationship with Louisiana Fish Fry is strong, and we’ve been working together for like five years now. This is a big part of my life, I’ve been doing this for a long time. And when they came out with a chicken fry, I was like ‘Yo, I make a fire chicken sandwich!’ And they were like ‘Okay, we’ll make it.’ And we made it, and it became this whole phenomenon, ‘Let’s see who makes the best fried chicken sandwich in America.'”
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Spears said he wasn’t necessarily expecting this contest or the chicken side of the company to take off as much as it has, but it’s been impressive to see.
“It really started with a labor of love, and with a brand that always for me, for a long time, had been about fish. But the chicken fry has done phenomenal business-wise, and it also has created something that pretty much everybody relates to. I think it took on a life that we didn’t think or know it would, but we here now.”
He said he’s got a personal connection to this contest, as chicken sandwiches are something he made a lot growing up and continues to make today.
“I grew up in Louisiana, and all food speaks to us, pretty much. But a chicken sandwich, it was one of the easiest things to be able to cook, and an alternative to a burger. And I think just growing up making them and making fried chicken sandwiches, and there’s a correlation with some brands I won’t mention that make chicken sandwiches, obviously you know who they are, but I’m always like ‘The one I make is the best.’
“I’d been making it since high school, and then in college, and it’s the same exact way I do it now. So it’s just been something that’s been a part of what I do. When you’re young, you feel like it’s amazing, because you’re actually cooking, and just cooking in general makes you a gourmet chef.
“And now, it’s something that I do for my kids, it’s an easy meal to be able to put together. And Louisiana Fish Fry created the chicken fry to make it even easier, you just empty it out of the box and you’re in business. So it’s been something that’s been a part of my life; it’s an easy meal, but a really good meal that I’ve been cooking for a long time.”
Spears said it’s been neat to see the different ways contestants have approached these sandwiches, with the regional winners including a fried Thai chicken sandwich, a Bayou Bleu Crunch po-boy, a Nashville hot chicken sandwich with apricot glaze, an Asian-flavored sandwich with peach jam and coleslaw (Pituk’s entry, which was the eventual national winner), a ‘Crying Blue’ sandwich with caramelized onions and blue cheese mayo, and a fried chicken roll with an Old Bay-infused honey mustard sauce.
Spears said chicken sandwiches come with incredible potential for variety, which helped this contest work.
“You’ve got different seasonings, different sauces, different ways people can put the sandwiches together. For some people, the bread is a very important part of it. Some people use cheese, some don’t. You’ve got hot honey, lemon pepper, you can fry it regular, you can do all sorts of things, put coleslaw on it. Me, I put an egg over medium on it.
“It’s a bunch of combinations of various cuisines. You know, it’s similar; people are like ‘A burger is a burger’ until you have a really good burger, and then it’s like ‘No, a burger is not a burger. There’s different levels of burgers.’ And I think what this challenge did here was bring a lot of flavor to chicken sandwiches.
And Spears said he was impressed to see what the contestants came up with.
“These contestants were able to create a lot of variation, a lot of things that are close to them, how they like to do their spin on chicken sandwiches. …But also, some of them are super decorated, some of them are super decadent, some of them look like chefs’ masterpieces. But the one requirement that I had was that they gotta taste good.”
There’s no better way to celebrate Fried Chicken Sandwich Day than with me getting my first @lafishfry team member as Chief Fry Officer! Congratulations to Mindea from Atlanta, the new VP of Fried Chicken & National Champ from the Louisiana Fried Chicken Sandwich Challenge 🏆 pic.twitter.com/N3wo1FMaZo
— Marcus Spears (@mspears96) November 9, 2024
Spears said the contest overall, and the popularity of these regional events and the numbers of submissions they received, shows the power of food as a way to bring people together.
“I think the foundation of it is food. Food, to me, is a way that we can save the world. And I’m not being funny when I say that. I watch a show on Netflix called Somebody’s Eating Phil, I was a big fan of Anthony Bourdain and Parts Unknown, there’s a series on Netflix called High on the Hog that tells the African-American history of culinary arts and food. And every one of those shows that I watch, Andrew Zimmern, Guy Fieri, all of those shows that I watch, they’re super communal.”
He said bringing people together to talk that way can be highly beneficial.
“Guess what people aren’t doing? They’re not on their phones. They’re sitting at a table, they’re eating together, they’re laughing together, they’re talking about current events, they’re learning about each other’s culture, they’re learning about why other people eat certain things, why those foods are ingrained into the culture and why it means more than just sitting down and eating, the work that it took to actually get it from farm to table.
“All of those things to me are how you get back to a communal space, in a day and age where we’re all locked in on our phones. And I’m not knocking it, I’m texting, tweeting, I’m on social media. But it doesn’t give you that fulfillment of sitting down with people that you may know or not know and having face-to-face conversations over a great meal. So for me, that’s why it’s always a labor of love. Food to me is a connector, like music, but even more so, because everybody got to eat.”
Read on for Spears’ thoughts on his ESPN work, working with Jason Kelce on Monday Night Countdown, his NFL Live colleagues and why that show has been successful, the importance of reaching female football fans, and if he might get Dan Orlovsky to try a fried chicken sandwich.
