Hot Fish Sandwich

A family-run hot chicken shop in a strip mall a few minutes from the airport; the family opened its first restaurant in 2017. It's named for the chicken, but the catfish sandwich is the one to get: spiced, fried fillets with lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion, tartar and the house BJ sauce.

A squat blue-and-white fish house near Fisk and Meharry that has been frying fish since 1972, in this building since 1993. The whiting sandwich is the order: forearm-length cornmeal-crusted fillets with hot sauce, mustard, pickles and onion between two slices of white bread that can't hope to cover them.

A cinderblock hot chicken and fish shack on Main Street, opened in the 1990s by Bolton Matthews and his wife Dollye on his late uncle Bolton Polk's recipe. Order the fish: whiting or catfish, fried and dusted in the same spice as the chicken, on two slices of white bread with pickles.