BY MEG VAN HUYGEN for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 7/3/2026
The chicken at Hans’s Place was super good, then kinda bad? And is now super good again.
Let me preface this article by saying I fundamentally don’t believe in writing negative reviews, but I want to point folks back to this little bar if they’ve taken a break. I’m saying a bad thing in order to say a good thing. Stick with me here, okay?
When Hans’s Place on South Tacoma Way got bought in October 2023, after former owner Connie Peterson retired, we all flinched with the same lightning-bolt thought:
Is the chicken gonna stay good?
For me, the answer was no. I went in a few months after Connie’s baton was handed off to new owners Ge Gao and Chon Woo Lee, who’re based in nearby Graham. Now. If you buy a bar that’s renowned for its fried chicken, I thought, then surely you won’t change anything about the recipe. There’s no reason to worry, I thought.
But the fried chicken I’d received didn’t really even approach the standard of excellence for which Hans’s is known. It was stringy, veiny, and frankly pretty scrawny. Nothing sadder than the breast of an underfed chicken. The jojos, meanwhile, were markedly undercooked, a far cry from the crispy exterior and pillowy baked-potato interior we’ve come to expect from Hans’s jojo game. These were firm, snappy jojos that straight-up resisted my fork. It was a bummer, and I didn’t go back.
Until last week, when my guy and I were looking for an anonymous late-night beer. We made sure not to go to Hans’s hungry, based on past trauma. But when we sat down, we smelled the chicken frying.
Actually, let’s talk about the science of chicken and jojos for a sec, for the transplanted or otherwise uninitiated.
Fried chicken and jojos, or jos, as Tacoma likes to call them, feel more special and rare these days because a specific piece of equipment is necessary to cook ’em right. Jojos are distinct from potato wedges or steak fries in that they must be pressure-fried, not deep-fried. The pressure fryer is a stand-alone machine with its own set of legs that takes up extra floor space in a small bar kitchen, so we’ve started seeing them less and less, as the ubiquitous, space-saving deep fryer became more available. And also as commercial rent has surged upward per square foot, I’m sure. The deep fryer is the tiny house of commercial fryers. It also costs like $800, while the meter for a pressure fryer drops around $13K. Even if the pressure fryer itself is new, the kitchen still needs to have available space for it.
That’s why we associate killer fried chicken and jojos with a shitass highway roadhouse from a bygone era. They’re more likely to have a huge, clunky pressure fryer with the big ol’ crank on top.
But in the way that a tiny house lacks important features that’re found in a real house, the deep fryer lacks qualities that the pressure fryer possesses. When you deep-fry chicken or potato wedges, you just stick ’em in the fryer basket and dunk ’em. But when you pressure-fry them, you’re cranking that lid down and trapping them inside of a sealed chamber, then steaming them while at once frying them. The pressure buildup increases the internal boiling point of the water inside the food, thereby locking in its natural moisture and enabling it to be cooked both faster and at lower temperatures. The result is a way juicier, crispier product.
This is why fried chicken and jojos are all craggy and crusty. The pressurized system forces steam out so rapidly, it blocks the hot oil from penetrating the breading, keeping the inside from sogging or drying out. The expanding steam also causes the chicken or potato matter to shrink, and as the hot, moist interior pulls away from the crust, it leaves a hollow pocket in between. Hence the jojo’s jagged, knurled outer shell and its fluffy-puffy cloud of steamed potato within.
So. Hans’s Place has a pressure fryer. That’s why the chicken and jojos are so goddang good. See also: 2121 Tavern, The Spar, Terry’s Office, Saar’s Super Saver. These types of industrial-flavored, no-nonsense chicken establishments with room for a pressure fryer. That’s where your top-shelf fried chicken and jojos are hiding. It’s science.
All right, back to Hans’s! While nursing our beers at the bar and idly watching Seattle FIFA hijinks on the news last week, my guy and I ordered the half chicken and jos with sour cream on the side. Before we did, I asked the server, “Did the chicken fall off here, or is it good still? Because I had a bad experience last time, right after Connie sold the bar.”
The server seemed surprised and avowed that “No, we’re known for our great chicken!” I felt like a jerk. She didn’t have a single idea what I meant. Rather than belabor my point about something that happened two years ago, I decided to just trust this woman. And, lo, she had told us no lies. What we received was straight out of Central Casting: crunchy, crispy fried chicken skin that enveloped juicy, MEATY portions, not skinny and scrawny at all. Neither were they stringy, vein-laden ringers for Iggy Pop if he’d died 1,000 years ago. It was all, instead, immaculate. And also smelled that way.
Ah, god, and the skin. That chicken skin was articulate right out of the gate, chicharroned with absolute precision. So light and crystalline. My boyfriend, who’d sworn he wasn’t hungry and would just have a bite, easily devoured half, and it was so good that I wasn’t even mad because I love him and I want him to eat an equal amount of the delicious thing. It was so delicious that it would be cruel for either of us to deprive the other of exactly 50 percent. We were silently counting each other’s bites out there.
I want to say this as lovingly as possible. The jojos were still a bit … brisk. They did not yield easily to our forks, and I mourned the quintessential baked-potato innards that you expect from jojos (or “jos,” in this case). That said, I went back a couple days later and asked the server to let the jos surf around in the pressure fryer oil waves for two or three extra minutes, and they turned out fine. Also, my dude ordered a side of the jo chunks instead of the full jos, and they were exactly perfect, since the smaller chunks cook more quickly. But that’s my tip to you, if you like the full-length jojos: Ask the staff to leave them in the hole for a little longer, and they’ll be happy to oblige. Nobody wants a firm jo.
That’s all noise, though, because I could’ve sent them back for more pressure frying if I really needed to. Hans’s has the technology. This is a story about the fried chicken, and I’m thrilled to say that this historic spot that’s been slinging neighborhood beers since at least 1940 has restored its chicken reputation, at least in my eyes. No longer is the neighborhood being subjected to veiny bootleg fried chicken. I think we’re home and dry.
Hans’s Place
6504 South Tacoma Way, Tacoma WA. PH#253-474-6503
