Does Anyone Know Who Invented The Chicken Finger?

You know them. Your five-year-old cousin knows them. Your waitress at Applebee's knows them. Raising Cane's tycoon Todd Graves knows them. Dip it in ketchup, dip it in ranch, dip it in hot sauce. Call it a chicken finger, a chicken tender, or a chicken strip, even though those are technically three different things. (Chicken tenders are cut from the chicken tenderloin, chicken fingers come from the chicken breast, and chicken strips can be a combination of multiple chicken parts.) The chicken finger is an American institution, a lifeline for picky eaters, and one of the most eminently dippable foodstuffs in creation. (You can find our frozen tender ranking here.) But, where did they come from?

As is often the case with food origin stories (see also: onion rings), there's no one straight answer. The most commonly cited birthplace of the chicken tender is the Puritan Backroom, a restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, that really doesn't sound like the sort of place that would invent the chicken tender. (Puritans weren't exactly known for their love of fun little dippables.) 

The story goes that in 1974, the Puritan Backroom's Charlie Pappas began to take chicken trimmings, bread them, and fry them, marking the birth of the tender as we know it today. (The restaurant prefers "tenders" to "fingers," as chickens don't have fingers.) The mayor of Manchester, Joyce Craig, declared the city the "Chicken Tender Capital of the World" — and who are we to argue?

We may not be ones to argue, but others certainly are. Some sources point to Mussari's Sun Valley Motel and Restaurant in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, as the origin of the chicken finger. The restaurant advertised "French fried chicken tenders" in 1966. Mussari's closed a long time ago, so they're not around to make their case — unlike Spanky's of Savannah, Georgia, which calls itself "home of the original chicken finger" since 1976, or Guthrie's, a chain that originated in Haleyville, Alabama, which claims to be "America's original chicken finger restaurant". (There were other recorded uses of "chicken fingers" or "chicken tenders" well before any of these restaurants, but they didn't refer to what we know today as chicken fingers.)

So, who's telling the truth? Well, as previously mentioned, the Puritan Backroom is commonly agreed upon as the originator, but the 1966 ad at Mussari's seems to dispute this. It's entirely possible, however, that all these establishments came upon fried poultry innovations independently. And, no matter who invented them, chicken fingers have ended up right where they need to be: in baskets, bowls, and Styrofoam containers all across America, ready for dipping and eating.