A simple trick of the food writing trade is to ask restaurateurs where they like to dine, when they’re able to break away from their own establishments. They’re foodies with an experienced eye for what works, so it’s no surprise that the places they recommend tend to be worth a visit.

But, sometimes, the places themselves are a surprise. During recent forays into the wilds of Baldwin County, I’ve had several respected restaurant operators tell me, “… and you know what else is good? Champy’s.”

Champy’s Famous Fried Chicken? The funky little chain whose eight stores are scattered from central Tennessee to south Alabama, with locations in Alabaster, Muscle Shoals and Madison? That Champy’s?

Yes, they say. Champy’s might not have a big menu, they say, but what they do, they do very well.

This seemed worthy of investigation, and it didn’t require much of a road trip. Champy’s store in Daphne sits alongside U.S. 98 about two and a half miles south of I-10, south of the Walmart and near a new Aldi grocery store.

The bland commercial exterior does nothing to prepare a first-time visitor for a character-rich interior that feels like a neighborhood pub and diner. There’s hardly a square inch of wall that isn’t covered with some kind of memorabilia, some of which reflects the Mississippi roots of the chain’s founders. I and a friend settled in at a four-top next to a representative sample of wall clutter: A Stevie Ray Vaughan concert poster, a New York state license plate, a notice advertising Trivia Thursdays with $2.50 PBR tallboys.

The menu is simple but not bare. Appetizers include wings, fried jalapenos, fried pickle spears and other bad-for-you goodies – but we had been strongly advised to try the tamales, so we ordered half a dozen ($12.99 with slaw and crackers).

As for entrees, there are salads topped with chicken (fried, grilled or buffaloed). You can order chicken for the family (eight pieces for $25.99 up to 20 for $46.99) or family meals that include sides. Chicken plates come in various configurations – chicken or chicken tenders, white or dark. And there’s one other outlier we’ll get to in a minute.

I went with the two-piece white meat plate ($10.99 with baked beans, slaw and white bread), while my companion, who often walks the fine line between childlike and childish, ordered the four-piece chicken tenders basket ($12.25 with fries). That in itself was eyebrow-raising, but the tamales arrived before I could inquire.

Why tamales? Because the Champy’s story starts in the Mississippi Delta, where, as legend has it, Todd Putnam hung the nickname “Champy” on his childhood friend Seth Champion. Hot tamales are a thing in the Delta country, so much so that a “Tamale Trail” figures in Mississippi tourism promotions.

Champion and his wife, Crissy, opened the first Champy’s in Chattanooga in 2009, banking mainly on a family recipe for fried chicken but also paying tribute to the Delta by including tamales on the menu. Two years later, Putnam and his wife, Erin, opened the second Champy’s in Daphne.

“We’re from Indianola,” said Erin Putnam. The tamale trail was no abstract concept for them, growing up: She has childhood memories of trips into Greenville, she said, when the family took a pot to bring home a supply of fresh tamales.

Todd Putnam said the Champy’s take features a little more ground beef and a little less masa than a truly authentic version. They’re also boiled rather than steamed. I’m not prepared to weigh in on authenticity, but I found them quite tasty: The corn husks keep them well-formed and firm as they cook, and the flavor is mildly spicy. The pepper builds slowly from bite to bite but isn’t going to make you sweat. You may start out thinking of them as an appetizer and finish up realizing they were a meal, because you just couldn’t stop.

A waitress later offered a pro tip: Try a little sweet heat barbecue sauce on your tamale, like some of the regulars do. I gave it a shot. It’s weird, but it’s weird in an interesting way.

As the dining duo finished up the tamales, their entrees arrived. You’ll hear people say that Champy’s isn’t fast-food fast, and it’s true, but the wait didn’t seem unreasonable. “We cook to order,” said Todd Putnam. “Chicken takes 15 minutes to cook.”

If you want it faster, there are places that keep it ready under heat lamps. That is not the Champy’s way. “You set the expectation, and people come to appreciate that,” Todd Putnam said.

My two-piece plate, a breast and a wing, delivered exactly what he’d been led to expect: Perfectly straightforward fried chicken done right, with the chicken hot and tender, the breading crispy but not greasy, the seasoning distinct but not obtrusive. My companion was, if anything, even more impressed. He pronounced the breading to be “a true engineering marvel,” observing that it was thick but still light enough that it didn’t overwhelm the chicken it coated.

“Why would a grown man order chicken tenders?” I asked.

“I love every part of a fried chicken, even those parts of the bird that don’t actually exist,” came the lofty response. “I also love the ones that don’t do the yard bird any good, such as the wings.”

My friend was somewhat taken aback by the sheer size of the strips. They were quite large and arrived atop a mound of crispy, hot fries. To say the portions were generous is an understatement; the big guy ate two of the tenders, along with a fistful of fries, and fetched the other two strips home to share with his long-suffering spouse.

Later, I sat down with the Putnams to get the whole story. As it turns out, they were living in Tennessee when the Champions opened the first Champy’s in Chattanooga. They didn’t move to Lower Alabama to open a restaurant. They came to Daphne, a place where they knew only one person, because of Todd’s job in logistics required a move. Before long, the couple had decided it was time for a life change.

“We just kind of quit corporate American on a whim, almost,” said Todd Putnam. “A lot of people thought we were having a mid-life crisis.”

“I’m not sure we weren’t,” said Erin Putnam.

And so, the second Champy’s opened its doors in Daphne in early May 2011. It took a little bit of time to get the concept across. Some local diners weren’t sure how to handle a tamale wrapped in a corn husk tied with a string. “The second day we were open, I wrote on a chalkboard, ‘How to eat a tamale,’” said Erin Putnam.

“It’s everything everybody warns you about, the first few years,” she said of the restaurant business. Over time, though, the appeal of simple things done right was unstoppable. As I chatted with the Putnams, I noticed a bar patron wearing a “Champy’s Drinking Club” T-shirt. “We didn’t make those,” said Todd Putnam. “That’s something they went out and had printed on their own.”

The chain’s growth has been idiosyncratic, but typical franchise sprawl was never the goal. The word “friendchise” gets thrown around. The owner-operators remain a close-knit group, Todd Putnam said.

There’s more latitude than with a typical franchise arrangement, he said. There are certain core things that have to be observed, such as the chicken recipe and the cooked-to-order approach. But the stores don’t have to look the same, and the menus don’t have to be perfectly identical. You might find a crawfish boil, if you’re at the right Champy’s at the right time.

“You get a little freedom,” he said.

I mentioned a menu outlier earlier, and it’s something I just had to go back and try: The “Delta Delight” catfish plate featuring Delta farm-raised catfish ($14.99 with fries, slaw and hush puppies). Now, I’ll argue that fried catfish is even easier to screw up than fried chicken: The flesh is more delicate and usually thinner to boot. It takes a practiced hand to cook it just so without drying it out.

Friends, whoever’s in the kitchen at Champy’s has a very practiced hand indeed. I have never in my life put a bite of catfish in my mouth that was hotter than what I got at Champy’s. Piping hot doesn’t cover it. You’ll want to have a cold beer in your free hand when you take that first bite. By rights it should have been a cinder, yet it was just as flaky, moist and tender as you could ask. Some sort of wizardry must be involved. As with the chicken, the breading accentuated the flavor rather than dominating it.

Once again, Champy’s had created a modest expectation – something simple, done right – and beaten it to smithereens by doing exactly what they promised.

“Over the years, people have been like, you need to add this to the menu, you need to add that,” said Todd Putnam. “But we do a handful of things. We do it all fresh, cooked to order. It’s a quality over quantity thing. We don’t want to do 50 things okay, we want to do 10 things really well. That’s our mentality. Keep it simple. We are what we are. We’re a fried chicken joint with some beers on tap and some TVs, kind of an everyman restaurant.”

As business models go, that’s a pretty tasty one.

Champy’s World Famous Fried Chicken is at 27080 U.S. 98 in Daphne. Other stores (with other owners) are at 10695 Ala. 119 in Alabaster; 8020 Madison Blvd. in Madison and 120 2nd St. in Muscle Shoals. For full information, visit champyschicken.com.