Jack Pirtle’s approach to business was a simple one: Good food and good prices. The same philosophy and Pirtle Pride is what keeps customers coming back today, just as it did more than 50 years ago.

“Here was the main thing about Mr. Jack,” said longtime employee Elaine Taylor. “He wanted the food done right.”

Right meant two things: Homemade, and Jack’s recipes. After splitting from Kentucky Fried Chicken, Jack and his wife Orva created their own special blend of seasonings that Jack prepared himself—tucked away in his locked seasoning room—several times a week. He took pride and care, and his expected the same of his employees.

Take the chili, for instance. One person cooked the chili for all the restaurants.

“And you better not spoil it,” recalled Carrie Watts. “That’s why he had one person cook it. If it was messed up, that way he would know who did it.”

The chili for the hot dogs was made from chicken gizzards, not beef, and it was thickened with leftover biscuits. This was testament to both Jack’s frugality and his ingenuity.

“He didn’t believe in throwing away anything,” Elaine said.

Nowadays chicken comes to the restaurants pre-cut, but for more than 20 years, employees cut whole chickens. Livers and gizzards have always been on the menu, but there were more coming in than going out. When he was a teenager, Jack’s son and present owner of Jack Pirtle’s, Cordell Pirtle, would sell the surplus to a local grocer for pocket money. When Jack figured out how much money his boy was making, he those gizzards had value. That’s when he came up with the recipe for the chili.

“It tasted just like beef,” Carrie said. “You would never have known.”

The famous steak sandwich was hand-pounded to a thin cutlet, cooked in the pressure cookers used for the chicken, then seared on the grill and served with the famous cracklin’ gravy and cole slaw on a fresh toasted bun. The ingredients were surprisingly sophisticated for the time and the simple food: One ingredient in the slaw was tarragon vinegar.

There was a biscuit maker on staff who made the biscuits, the gravy and the desserts.

“Everything was from scratch, and ooh, those biscuits were so good,” Elaine said.

Today the menu is largely the same and so are the recipes, though much of it is made off-site. The chicken is still cooked in each store, using Jack’s special seasoning, and the grills, which were gone for a while, are back.

“We’ve always been famous for it,” Carrie said. “The steak sandwich, foot longs, burgers. Once we even had barbecue bologna.”

Jack Pirtle’s has other claims to fame, too. In an episode of “Adventures in Hollyhood,” Grammy award-winning rappers Three 6 Mafia return home to Memphis for inspiration. Their first stop is Jack Pirtle’s Fried Chicken. Local politicians get their chicken fix at Jack Pirtle’s, and regulars from Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit come in once a month or so and get steak sandwiches packed to go on their way out of town.

But ask any of the employees who have been with Jack Pirtle’s for 30, 40 or even more years, and they’ll tell you it’s really about the chicken, though.

“I’ve been eating that chicken every day for 30-something years, and I still want it every day,” said Flora Hearvey.

Not only did Jack come up with the seasoning for the chicken, he came up with his own system for cooking it after his split with Kentucky Fried Chicken.

According to Cordell, his father created a pressure-frying system that works something like this: Two steel pots sit side-by-side, each capable of frying 56 pieces of chicken. As one batch finished, the chicken was removed and the frying oil dispensed through a drain at the bottom, where it went through three filters, each finer than the previous one. After being cleaned, it was pumped through a pipe that moved between the frying pots. It would fill the empty one, and more cooking commenced.

It made for good chicken.

“I could eat a biscuit and thigh for breakfast every day of my life,” Carrie said.

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