The French have never heard of it. Neither have most Italians. Today, it’s a widely eaten Italian American staple, an icon of wedding buffets for decades. So where did this buttery, lemony chicken come from?

Chicken Francese, or sometimes spelled Chicken Francaise, or simply Chicken French in upstate New York, is an egg battered cutlet served in an acidic sauce made from lemon, butter, and sometimes wine. One of the signature elements of a Francese is the crispy, fried crust of the chicken has become softened by the acidic sauce.

Though the name implies a connection to French cuisine, other than a passing similarity to beurre blanc, a butter sauce, the lemon-forward chicken Francese is an entirely Italian American creation. The earliest recipes were actually cooked with veal in the early half the twentieth century as Italian American restaurants were growing in popularity. Veal cutlets were a popular protein in the mid-century used for veal parmigiana, marsala, and pizzaiola, with chicken eventually serving as a cheaper substitute.

Cooking a Francese style meat isn’t entirely foreign to Italian cooks. Chicken Francese has a similar flavor profile to chicken piccata, a dish that does have roots in Italy. Also similar is vitello indorato and pollo indorato, with indorato translating to gilded. The preparation is an egg battered chicken that is fried. This may have been the inspiration for earlier recipes prepared as veal Francese.

There are references to dishes like pollo indorato in Italian literature in the 20th century. The 1927 Italian novel, Natìo borgo selvaggio by Ferdinando Paolieri for instance, references pollo indorato, describing a young chicken, gilded and fried. While this is not a formal recipe, it does indicate a wider familiarity with preparing a cutlet of meat by battering it in egg.

As far back as the 1930s, ads for Italian American restaurants that serve veal Francaise as a chop or scaloppine appeared on the east coast. The veal chop was an oddity, with most serving veal scaloppine. The Italian-style scaloppine is a thin, boneless cut of meat similar to the French-style paillard or escalope. It’s not a recipe, and a scaloppine might be served in any number of styles, popularly as piccata, marsala, or francese. Americans are more likely to call this a cutlet.

There was not a definitive veal francese recipe, though most followed the same flavor profile of an egg-battered cutlet with a brownish sauce made from lemons and an acid. In 1955, Chef Nick Rose offered a class teaching veal Francese that included adding parmesan cheese, advertised in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Other versions included building the sauce with wine, an ingredient that isn’t necessarily standard to the dish. Largely these were similar dishes served alongside pasta, rice, or potatoes.

Veal Francese seemingly hit its peak popularity around the mid-twentieth century. The dish is far more likely to feature chicken today, but this change happened gradually.

Who invented Chicken Francese?

Rochester, New York is well-known for chicken Francese, at least among Rochester food enthusiasts. Here the dish is known as Chicken French, a name coined by a local restaurateur, and who also claims credit for inventing the dish.

Sometime in the post-war period, veal Francese was introduced to Rochester-area restaurants. William Ramsey at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle credits Tony Mammano and Joe Cairo as having brought the veal dish to the city. They called this dish Veal French, and set the stage for Rochester to become the home of French’d foods.

The chicken dish that made Frenching food famous originated with James J. Cianciola, known as Chef Vincenzo. He claims credit for inventing Chicken French, based on the recipe for veal Francese introduced by Mammno and Cairo.

Cianciola and his brother Nate owned the Brown Derby, a Rochester restaurant, where they cooked up the dish in the 1970s. They operated the restaurant for three decades, beginning in 1967, and it was locally known as a destination for local celebrities and politicians.

Cianciola started out cooking veal French, developing his own unique recipe, according to, Frenching Food Italian Style, a recipe collection he co-wrote. But when the dish won international recognition, the restaurant attracted anti-veal protestors. Animal rights activists rallied against veal in the 1970s, with similar efforts sinking products like Burger King’s Veal Parmigiana sandwich. The Brown Derby found another solution, which was to replace the veal with chicken.

After some experiments, Chicken French was added to the menu, and then soon copied by surrounding restaurants. Though the Brown Derby has since closed, Chicken French became a popular local dish. Meanwhile, Cianciola didn’t stop with chicken. He applied the recipe to artichokes, shellfish, eggplants and more.

Cianciola wasn’t the only cook inventing new variations on veal Francese though. A 1975 issue of Town and Country recommends the shrimp Francese at Joe’s restaurant on MacDougal Street in the West Village. Good Housekeeping in 1982 suggested pork francese as part of a “40-minute meal” cookbook. Other variations of French’d foods appear on Italian American menus.

When did Chicken Francese become popular?

Chicken Francese wasn’t always the lemony Italian American dish we recognize today. In the 1950s, the dish chicken Francaise was applied to a roasted chicken prepared with paprika rather than a pan-fried cutlet with a lemon sauce. The term applied to this preparation through the 1960s.

Over the next decade, the more recognizable, Italian American version of chicken Francese rose to prominence. While it’s possible this evolution in terminology is owed to Cianciola’s invention and the Rochester food scene, their chicken French doesn’t account for the widely available Chicken Francese and Francaise common on the menus of Italian American restaurants.

The reason for the Italian American egg-battered chicken Francese becoming the preferred recipe over the paprika chicken may simply be a matter of the growing popularity of Italian eateries. In either case, by the late 1970s and 1980s, magazines like Redfin, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and others were publishing Chicken Francese recipes we eat today.

As for the popularity of chicken Francese over other proteins, that might simply have to do with availability. Since 1980, per person chicken availability has doubled, surprising pork, beef, and fish by the pound. Numerous reasons contribute to the declining consumption of red meat, but health is probably the foremost concern–and chicken Francese benefits as it’s often seen as a light option. Today, Americans consume 100 pounds of chicken per person every year.

So then it’s not that surprising by 2018, the New York Times called Chicken Francese the single best thing to do with chicken breasts. Personally, I rather cook up a chicken piccata, but that’s another essay entirely.