Nashville hot chicken is, historically, a dish designed to hurt you.
That is not a figure of speech. The origin story involves cayenne applied as punishment. The food existed for decades as a local specialty that visitors were dared to try, sold from a handful of places that had no interest in explaining themselves to you.
It has no standard recipe. No portion standard. No agreed heat scale. And the defining characteristic of the dish is that most people cannot comfortably eat it.
Now try to build a restaurant chain on that.
Every instinct says it cannot work. A chain needs consistency, and there is no standard. A chain needs broad appeal, and the product is deliberately hostile. A chain needs repeat visits, and pain is not a habit most people want weekly.
And yet it happened. The dish went national, and the businesses that took it there solved a problem worth understanding.