The Man Behind Philadelphia’s Most Viral Fried Fish Sandwich | Behind the Hype | Bon Appétit

You know that old saying, you find something that you love doing, you'll do it for free. I will do this for free. Food's my life, man. Hi, y'all, see where I'm at. So we're trying the most viral fish sandwich in Philly. Jordan Johnson, the one and only, is a mad scientist. I have this little shop right behind me. To thrive, let alone survive, as a restaurant only open three days a week, you must be doing something right. We went from 30 to 50 pounds of fish in a month to 6,000, 8,000 pounds in a month. We never focused on trying to build a hype or be famous or get followers. We always focused on the product, the customers, and the service. Jordan Johnson's is black-owned. It's one of my favorite places to eat. Top place, number one. You get a lot of fish. He pack it with fish. The volume of food that's going out of here, there's nothing like seeing it in action. 49 hot, right here. Growing up the way I grew up, you don't have that mom and dad telling you, like, you did a good job. You're bouncing from home to home. No matter what, you never gave up, and you kept your faith, and you one day create something to receive that thing that you never had. Guys, I'd like to welcome you all to Jordan Johnson's in Northeast Philadelphia, Mayfair section. We've been open since May of 2024. Restaurant, is it named after me? It's named after my son, Jordan Johnson Jr. Fortunately, this is my name also, so we're at Jordan Johnson's. The shirt says, the back, my life as told through food, come and taste my story. That is the slogan, because every time I think of food, I always think about a moment in my life of where I was. I would say all my dishes draw inspiration from some place that I was at in life. Right now, the time is 9.10. We're about to enter into the restaurant and start getting all the things out that we need for the day. At 12 o'clock, we'll open for service and let the mayhem begin. If somebody asks me what kind of restaurant we were, I would say we're a fusional eclectic seafood restaurant. Our number one selling product is our buttermilk fried fish hoagies. Comes in a couple of different ways. High sweet chili, mango habanero, honey buffalo buttermilk fried fish hoagie. We also have a variety of fried rice dishes. Our number two selling item in the whole building is salmon fried rice. We also have Cajun wings, Thai sweet chili wings. All our wings are marinated, minimum 48 hours. And we have jumbo fried shrimps also. Might run specials, but it's pretty much all seafood. This was a formal dining room when we first acquired this property. We converted this into a kitchen. We really wanted to focus on pumping high volume and high quality. Almost every single inch of this building is geared around efficiency and volume. There's hundreds and hundreds of orders that can come in throughout the day. We've been able to do what used to take four or five hours, now 20 minutes. So we try to keep all the orders within a 10 minute window and get it out fresh to order. This right here is our grandioso, larger than life ordering area. Came from the dining business. We'd have two, 300 people in the building dining in. And this, we wanted this to be the complete opposite. Focus more so on the quality of the food, freshness of the food, consistency of the food, and just getting people in and out. It's a very small lobby. That was intentionally done. It was like, you know, either choose customers being comfortable while they're ordering food or they would be waiting hours for food. This beautiful sign right here that everybody so admirably ignores. This says absolutely no waiting in the lobby. They'll just literally just stand here. They'll literally hold their phones up and start recording and you know what I mean? And it's really uncomfortable. A lot of us don't feel like being on TikTok. We just want to work and you know, and there's a lot of action going on in here. This fryer right here was the fryer we started off with. We saw that that wasn't enough. So we got a second one. The business grew. We had to get a third one. The business grew. We had to get a fourth one and we're still growing. So as of right now, there's seven fryers. These are oversized fryers. That's all I can fit right here. This hood is completely maxed out. We're only open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We work a total of 24 hours for the whole weekend. This restaurant operating in only two and a half days out of the week by far trumps any restaurant that I've ever owned and operated in every number you want to pull up, in sales, in profit. The only peace of mind you have in this industry is when you're closed. You're not going to get the spills on the floor. You're not going to get, you know, hopefully you did everything right. The building don't burn down. As the years went on and I eventually took a step away from the business, I thought about how could I continue? Give me the mop quick. Y'all got more than one mop, right? This is a first. Had to bump it. All in a day's work, gentlemen. What's that, Murphy's law? Yeah, it's one of them type of things. There's a couple more of these going to happen before the day's out because Murphy's law has to, you know, preside. You know, what are you going to do? You know what I mean? You have to pick and choose your battles, you know? So, but this is actually something small. This is going to be a buttermilk fried fish hoagie. This is our magic. It's our buttermilk fried fish. Each one of these trays are about 40 to 50 pounds. We'll go through about 12 to 15 trays of this in a day. Our seasonings, proprietary seasonings that are in here. So don't dare ask what's in here outside of buttermilk. The love, the time, the attention, the details, the years of just playing in the kitchen and finding those things that work cohesively together. We like to go skin side down into our flour mixture. A house blend of flour, cornmeal, and our house seasoning. We like to really load the hoagies up around here. So we want to make sure we're getting some really nice pieces. Make sure we get both sides. All right, now we'll drop. We'll put that down, hit our timer for five minutes. So we have that fish working beautifully, frying his heart away. That's a beautiful golden brown that we've achieved. That's the color that we're looking for. And then there's always that carry over cook time, which will get a little bit deeper in color. You never know what God's going to bless you with. So if you got small pieces, then you might put seven, eight, nine pieces. Just make sure you load that puppy up so that way people are feeling that love. This is sarcones roll, just got delivered fresh. Sarcones is a famous Philadelphia bakery in South Philly. A great, beautiful family that's been around for many, many years. This is not your traditional soft roll that Philadelphians are used to. We scoop out every single roll. And so we're just left with, you know, the magic right here. I like to put mayo on mine. About five slices of cheese. Like to build everything nice and neat. Just chopped this morning. This is romaine lettuce that we're putting on here. A fresh Jersey tomatoes. A lot of people don't like onions. I can eat onions just raw all day long. This is a honey scotch bonnet pepper and truffle. Sweet, spicy, savory. It's just a really great addition to the fish. This is our way of showing love. You know, people are coming out. These hoagies start at $20. Just like to make sure that the people are getting their money's worth. And you know, we are in Philadelphia. Back in the days when you got a hoagie, that thing was like something, you know, that could feed a family. So we like to stay true to, you know, what hoagies used to be back in the days. I like to top mine off with just a little bit of salt, pepper, and oregano. And this right here is a Jordan Johnson's buttermilk fried fish hoagie. In a day, we'll roughly, you know, go through about three to 500. On a busy day, maybe five, 600. Whatever we do, if we do four, it's all counted as joy, because it's all a blessing. ETA guys, six mango wings for $2.12. Two hoagies, guys. No rush, whenever you get a chance. So we just opened up. We have 25 orders right now on the screen. Seven minutes into service. Jesus. It's a slow day for us. 49 hot, lime, parsley shaker. Y'all need a hoagie for 50. Sell 50. 86, pick up. 86, pick up, hurry. One tie, one bump. Bumping 187. 187. Two chicken fried rice with shrimp coming up. When I was about 28 years old, I bought my first restaurant. I'm not classically trained as a chef. I got first put to the stove when I was six years old, and I got showed how to make white rice and scrambled eggs. I winded up in foster care shortly after that. And I was in the system from the age of six all the way up until 21. And I was in home after home, just bouncing from homes all through New York, and then eventually winded up in Philadelphia, which I made home. As I went into different foster homes, I always found myself in the kitchen. I was always wanting to cook dinner at the different homes I was in, and going through the cabinets and playing with the seasonings. And it's like a kid playing with colors and crayons. So you learn how to come up with your own different styles and colors. And that's what it was for me. Growing up in New York and Lower East Side, in the dominantly Latin neighborhood, we had a store on 6th Street and Avenue D, and everybody from Lillian Wall Projects, Baruch Projects, Jacob Reese Projects, everybody ate there when we were kids. They used to sell $1 pork fried rice. I always wanted to make fried rice. But what I did was I would look at and find out, how did you make something, find out what the base is, and then I would deconstruct it and try to reconstruct it in a way that I would have a finished product. The second most popular selling item in the whole building is salmon fried rice. I don't know if you guys can handle the heat. I don't want to damage nothing. Boom, it's a whole lot of heat. It's a volcano. So we make sure we weigh out every single rice before it gets cooked. Let that get a little fry on it. We're going to dump our rice right on top. All of our proteins are weighed out. Really allows for us to really stay uniformed and consistent in delivering that same product that the customer has come to love throughout the years. We're going to add one heaping spoon for homemade hot chili oil. We call that the meat. A little bit of oil, hot chili oil. After that, we're going to drop in our salmon. Salmon is already marinated, seasoned, fried off. We're going to finish this off. Little handful of bean sprouts, one of my favorite things. I love the texture. Some fresh chopped scallions. One last toss. We're going to hit it with our magic. Turn that flame off. Let that sizzle. Try to get all that love inside the bowl. Give the people what they're paying for. And this is our signature salmon fried rice. This is just paying homage to 6th Street and Avenue D. That $1 pork fried rice that evolved. And I always feel as though food should always evolve. And that's what we try to do. We try to make everything we do unique in some way, shape, or form. Behind, 172 hot, 178 shrimp chicken coming up. About 30 seconds. Talk to me, next rice, guys. So this particular restaurant in its current iteration opened in May of 2024. I took a hiatus from the business. I had a really huge sit-down dining restaurant. The burnout came from working pretty much seven days a week. We were open six days a week. And then that one day that we were off, we had to restock and regroup and get everything back together. So there was never a day off. I missed out on the birthday parties. I missed out on the family reunions. I missed out on the baby showers. I missed out on weddings. Like, I could never celebrate those precious moments in life. Anybody who's been in this business, dedicated to this business, knows that the number one thing that kills all of us is the time. So I went on a hiatus in search of balance in my life, mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and, you know, financially. I had this idea that if I came back and I limited my menu, I shrunk my menu down and just focused on a couple of key things, which I find, I call it finding your Big Mac. What is that product gonna be that we're gonna give to the world? And I thought about fish hoagies. I love fried fish. I know places to get fish hoagies, but I didn't know where to get one that was just, was satisfied at craving. So I thought if I came back with a really amazing sandwich, I thought that it would work. Thanks to social media, word of mouth, and TikTok, and Instagram, and Facebook, those three engines, like, they really help catapult us to the level that we're at now. This is my office. So this is where we run payroll. This is where we conduct all of our interviews, meetings with staff or anybody that comes in. This is a complete contrast. Downstairs is where all the mayhem occurs, and upstairs is where you find the tranquility. This is our Instagram page. We have a little over 60,000 followers. We don't really record and use it ourselves. 90% of everything you'll see is going to be with collaborations with maybe one of the food bloggers from the city, or New York, or some other place. Y'all see this fish hoagie, man? Look at that. The seasoning and love they put in that nice, fluffy rice. Gordon Johnson is not just for the hype. This is my first time here, but you can mark my words, it will not be the last. One influencer led to another influencer led to another influencer, and the business just went through the roof. We went from 30 to 50 pounds in a month to 6,000, 8,000 pounds in a month. The gift and the curse with the social media, I think we live in a space right now where people are in love with the illusion of success. We take a completely different approach when we go about this thing that we do. We really focus on the product, we focus on the customers, we focus on the business. So it doesn't mean anything for me to have a million followers if my sales taxes aren't up to date. The gift is being able to touch people with a product that you have created. That's the biggest reward, to see the smiles on people's faces. I just know that when it comes to quality and as far as food, it's always gonna be the same expectation met. It's always gonna be good. You can order three pieces of fish for $12 or get sick for the 20. Definitely a bang for your buck. Food was delicious, it was unbelievable. Julian Johnson is my favorite place to eat inside of Philadelphia. The top place, number one. Where I'm from in the minority communities, a lot of us, we lack structure. And even when we're endeavoring into business, our businesses lack structure also. And this is a restaurant where not only is there volume here, but there is structure in this building. You know, you will do it the right way. There's no two ways about it. And that's a non-negotiable. Napkin, please, napkin. Next time, please. When I ask for a napkin, just give me a napkin. Do not grab napkins, just give out a bunch, all right? People are coming in here spending money that they don't have to spend. And times are really tough right now. Regardless, contrary to popular belief, times are really tough. So to he who much is given, much will be expected. Like this is what you sign up for. You owe it to these people to give them your all. Right now, we're at the Dungeon, Bozzi's Gym. It's one of my trainers I had growing up. It was a very intricate part of my life. Taught me a lot, a lot of things in boxing instilled that foundation for discipline and how to make sacrifices. A large part of what we do into the restaurant, this is the foundation of it that's translated into the culinary world for me. So I started boxing when I was about 14 years old in Philadelphia. I hung up the gloves, like probably like in my late 20s, I kind of like walked away. I'd like to say that I boxed for like a good portion of my life before I gave it up. Well, Jordan was a young kid, man. No, he's that goddamn boy, back in the 90s. This pad man, no, boss man. He's actually also a very, very dear customer of mine. He's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday type of guy. Two to three days a week. Best fish in the city. When y'all get the fish, you gotta get the supreme sauce. Make sure you get two supreme sauce, not one. This was my original goal as a kid, was to just be able to hit this bag. They say it's eye and hand coordination. What I learned throughout the years, that's a very minimal part of it. This is a timing thing. So that's what this helps you develop, your timing. It's one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Everything is about like time and precision in our restaurant. There's like no rest. You know, if you can get in a ring and somebody's trying to punch you in your face, you know, knock you out in front of thousands of people, you know, it's a similar type of feeling when you have hundreds of people coming out and they've paid for something and they're expecting you to deliver. So you want to knock these orders out. That's the best way I can put it, you know. He know me to be the best, whatever he do. I mean, he put his whole heart and mind and soul into it. You know what I mean? Whatever he do, you know what I mean? He been doing that since he was young. He always been like an entrepreneur. He always had that mindset. You know what I mean? Always had that mindset. Behind her, careful. That's the last one, right? Rice on 10. Just been such a huge blessing that I can't even put into words. I would love to franchise this model in the future so that other people can buy into something that allows them to have back the time with their family. That's what this was about. This weekend thing was about me being able to, you know, see my loved ones, see my friends, see my family. Doing this model, this business with this system that we have in this ecosystem, it allows me to have a personal life now. You have to focus on what's in front of you and not this illusion of what success looks like in the far off future. Just by remaining focused and being disciplined and consistent, then just don't give up. You have no choice but to win. It has to work or it has to work. Like, there's no other options.