Mother Cluckers serving comfort food in Pass Christian

The chicken at Mother Cluckers in Pass Christian is extra tasty and crunchy.

When two well-known white-coat chefs told friends they were thinking about opening a fried chicken restaurant, the response generally was something like, “You (expletives) are crazy.”

Said co-owner Victor Pickich, “We heard it so much, we started playing around with the name.”

With some help from a web designer, that is how the Mother Cluckers restaurant got its name. How it got its menu was a little more complicated.

Pickich and chef Thomas Genin, both professional trained in culinary skills, once owned a fine-dining restaurant and a seafood eatery in Pass Christian.

But they wanted to serve something reasonably priced with broad appeal and turned their attention to chicken and pork.

“Good food is good food,” Pickich said. “We put a lot of passion in it.”

They also put a lot of time in developing marinate and batter for the fried chicken. “We worked really hard,” Pickish said about applying their culinary background to making the chicken extra tasty and crunchy. “We ate fried chicken every day for two months. I never thought we’d put so much time in something, but we knew we wanted it good.”

They worked with the flour, refined the batter and balanced the spices until they found the right recipe.

“Seasoning is always key,” he said. “We wanted it good.”

Mother Cluckers also offers that other Southern staple: barbecue.

“Being local guys, we’ve done barbecue like our whole lives, and we think we’re the best at it like every guy with a grill,” said Pickich.