All around Woonsocket, in the Blackstone Valley north of Providence, the nation’s smallest state sports big restaurants that serve gigantic meals built around boundless bowls of roast chicken. Sides always include pasta and fried potatoes, a garlicky salad, and baskets of bread. For dessert: ice cream and coffee. Meals in Rhode Island’s chicken dinner halls are dished out family-style, all-you-can-eat.
The state’s habit of abundant weekly poultry feasts—an inland echo of its passion for multicourse shore dinners—took shape at the Bocce Club in the 1920s when the Pavoni family began serving dinner to friends who came to their house to play bocce. Today’s biggest purveyor of chicken dinners, and one of the largest restaurants in the nation, is Wright’s Farm, which actually began as the chicken farm where the Pavonis bought their birds. Every night it is open, Wright’s Farm’s seventy-five ovens send out over a ton of chicken to six cavernous dining rooms that can seat over 1200 people at one time.