The Big Apple is, among other things culinary, a tribute to provincial cooking. It’s the place in America where — at a decided remove from their origins — regional cuisines get their due and honest local foods are accorded the reverence they deserve.

New York City has hot dog diners that conjure Chicago by way of troweling neon-green relish on a Vienna tube. And there’s at least one good cheesesteak stand that works magic with the Philadelphia troika of chopped beef, griddled onions, and Cheez Whiz. Of late, though, Southern food has been ascendant.

You could call it a legacy of the Clinton years. Or you might say it has something to do with Bush (though he’s not really from Texas). More likely it’s a response to the perceived homogenization of American culture, by which I mean that, faced with the prospect that our nation is fast becoming one big strip mall with a Wal-Mart anchoring one end and a McDonald’s the other, we are waking up to the import of distinctive regional culture and regional cuisine. And when Americans go looking for that, we turn our attentions to the South, where blues and jazz were born and fried chicken and barbecue traditions were honed.

Postmodern barbecue restaurants with Southern bona fides (or at least proud regional pedigrees) have been popping up with frequency in New York City for the past decade. RUB, aka Righteous Urban Barbecue (a joint on 23rd Street) and Blue Smoke (a comparative palace on 27th Street) are among the best of the breed. And it seems as if in summer there’s a Daisy May’s BBQ cart on every third corner.

But fried chicken, that other great Southern export, has been in short supply. Sure, those inclined to make the trek up to Harlem could always grab a leg and a thigh and a biscuit at Miss Mamie’s or Charles’ Southern Style Kitchen. And fans of Latin fried chicken have long doted on New Caporal, a fast-food window way up above 150th Street, where they marinate the chicken in mojo, deep fry it, and pile it atop a nest of curlicue fries. But fried chicken — really good fried chicken — has not been an everyday indulgence for New Yorkers. Until now.

Among New Yorkers they are known as the team that made the diminutive East Village restaurant, Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, a place of pilgrimage for Oysters Rockefeller Deconstructed. New Orleanians, on the other hand, know them as the duo who quit the big city and, weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, opened Longbranch, a fine dining outpost across the lake in Abita Springs.

Dirty Bird seems, at first blush, an odd career move. Simply put, it’s a fastfood takeaway. Granted, they fry free-range birds and serve free-trade coffee. But there’s nothing grand about Dirty Bird. That’s a large part of the appeal.

The look is modern, almost austere. This is no exercise in nostalgia, no Cracker Barrel knockoff geared to appeal to expatriate Southerners pining for kitsch and collards. The storefront is a floor-to-ceiling plane of glass. Above the entrance hangs an electric-orange awning. The ceiling is girded by maple beams. The walls are white subway tiles, scrubbed and gleaming. Bright-orange and green signage advertises the bill of fare.

Order the fried chicken and you get a bird that has been soaked in a sugar-and-salt brine, double-dipped, and then fried to a ruddy brown. Drumsticks emerge from their oil berth crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside, the way God intended. Ditto the thighs. Even breasts — almost always drier — are, thanks to the brine, moist beneath the crust.

When I visited in June, there were a few misses on the menu. The slow-roasted potatoes were yawners. And the cauliflower was not blooming but wilting. The chicken, however, was worthy of a farm woman’s table. And even better was the dirty rice, enlivened by a spry mix of chopped livers and giblets.

In an effort to get every bit of dirty rice in my mouth, I broke off a piece of shallot cornbread and chased each grain around the bowl. The taste of that cornbread — the sweet intensity of our native maize, the angular punch of shallot — told me that, once and for all, the cooking of the Southern provinces has entered the workaday gastronomic lexicon of New York City. With any luck, it’s there to stay.