Review: KFC's New Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl Brings The Spice For A Low Price

At the start of 2025, KFC introduced a fresh lineup of chicken-nugget bowls to its menu, all at a $5 price point. The selection includes a brand-new Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl, along with a few tried-and-true favorites.

Of course, the Famous Bowl is already a popular item at KFC, combining the chain's signature chicken nuggets with mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, and a three-cheese blend. While the Famous Bowl is the only bowl-based entree available year-round, KFC has offered a few limited-time spin-offs in recent years, like Mac & Cheese Bowls and the KFC Smash'd Potato Bowls. This limited-time January 2025 bowl lineup is the chain's most extensive riff on the bowl concept yet, bringing back the Mac & Cheese Bowl and allowing customers to add Nashville hot sauce or an online-exclusive Korean BBQ sauce to that, or to the classic Famous Bowl.

Alongside those updates to established items is the novel Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl. It retains the same style of nuggets that are in the Famous Bowl, but, among other alterations, uses fries rather than mashed potatoes as its base. I tried the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl myself, and even compared it to a couple other KFC bowls to get a better sense of what makes it unique. The following is a detailed rundown of what to expect from the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl, in addition to my review of the item after picking one up from my local KFC. 

While the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl is on KFC's bowl menu, and uses a literal bowl for a container, it's more comparable to a loaded fries entree than a typical bowl-based dish. In fact, it's very similar in composition to a loaded fries item that Dave's Hot Chicken — one of the chain restaurants that are expanding in 2025 — introduced in December 2024. I happened to try and enjoy Dave's new loaded fries just a few weeks before taste-testing a Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl, and hardly find it surprising that this style of Nashville hot chicken-based loaded fries is becoming increasingly universal.

Of course, the base of the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl is a serving of the french fries that made their debut after KFC pulled Potato Wedges off the menu. The fries are topped with sweet coleslaw, pickle slices, five chicken nuggets, and Nashville hot sauce. A pinch of shredded cheese was included on top of my order, but it's more of a garnish than a key flavor component. The sauce, notably, isn't limited to just the chicken nuggets, but is mixed in with all of the bowl's ingredients. 

One of the untold truths of KFC is that almost all of its locations are franchises, meaning that prices are not uniform from restaurant to restaurant. With that said, the price point of each item on the limited-time January 2025 bowl menu is a key feature of the promotion. Accordingly, the online price for the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl at both my local KFC in Henderson, Nevada (just outside of Las Vegas) and a KFC in the heart of Manhattan is $5 flat. However, at a location in Honolulu, the bowls are $7 each, though this was the only KFC I could find with a higher price point. 

Where my local KFC and that Manhattan location differ is in the price of a combo meal, which simply pairs the bowl with a drink — at my closest location, the combo is priced at $7.99, whereas in Manhattan the combo costs $8.99. Similar combo price points hold true for the other bowls on the menu that are currently being offered for $5 on their own, including the original Famous Bowl. 

KFC's press release announcing the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl and the rest of the $5 loaded bowl menu specifies that the promotion is only available for a limited time. Just how limited that amount of time will be is unclear. Unlike, say, Taco Bell, promotional items aren't exactly a staple of the KFC menu, so it's hard to estimate a length of time based on precedent. Anyone interested in trying the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl, therefore, might want to do so sooner rather than later in case the promotion concludes unexpectedly quickly.

Altogether, the lineup of promotional items available also includes a Nashville Hot Mac & Cheese Bowl, a Nashville Hot Famous Bowl, and a regular Mac & Cheese Bowl. Additionally, versions of the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl and Mac & Cheese Bowl are available online-only with Korean BBQ Sauce — which is returning from the new KFC Saucy Nuggets lineup introduced in August 2024. That said, neither of my two closest KFCs offered the Korean BBQ Sauce online, and the press release specifies that this variation's availability varies by location. 

I ordered all three Nashville Hot bowls on the limited-time KFC bowl menu, so beyond just their ingredients, I was able to analyze how they differ from one another firsthand. First off, my Nashville Hot Famous Bowl contained the most food of all three options. While this conclusion is not entirely scientific, I know this was the case because the container was far heavier than either of its companions. The item consists of mashed potatoes, corn, gravy, five chicken nuggets, Nashville hot sauce, and shredded cheese. Of course, this is identical to the regular Famous Bowl, save for the addition of Nashville hot sauce.

Meanwhile, the Nashville Hot Mac & Cheese Bowl simply consists of KFC's mac and cheese, five chicken nuggets, Nashville hot sauce, and shredded cheese. The Mac & Cheese Bowl was also the lightest of the three, but pretty comparable to the Loaded Fries Bowl. Unsurprisingly, the regular Mac & Cheese Bowl includes all of the same ingredients as its spicy counterpart save for Nashville hot sauce. (Each Korean BBQ version substitutes the Nashville hot sauce with Korean barbecue sauce.) Entirely unique to the KFC bowl menu, then, are the fries and coleslaw in the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl, since its chicken nuggets, cheese, and Nashville hot sauce are included in other menu items. 

The first thing that stood out to me about the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl was how it seemed to consist of more coleslaw than french fries. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, however — the pronounced sweetness of the coleslaw provided a pleasant contrast to the genuinely spicy Nashville hot sauce. I appreciate spicy food, so that spice level wasn't challenging, but I would describe it as spicy all the same. The pickles, meanwhile, are predominately tangy rather than sweet. There were only two pickle slices, so they're not a defining ingredient, but my bites that included them benefited from some additional complexity.

Both my fries and chicken nuggets stayed pretty crispy, even though I brought my order home. That's especially surprising considering how the Nashville hot sauce is distributed throughout the bowl, including on the fries. Somehow they never became soggy. 

While the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl's flavor is especially bold for fast food, and matched by satisfyingly crispy textures, its biggest detractor is how the chicken nuggets fit into the bigger picture. Without using a knife, it's basically impossible to cut the chicken nuggets into smaller pieces. So, I found myself eating each nugget as its own bite, before chasing it with some fries and coleslaw. While that's not ideal, the dish works so well on the whole that I didn't mind the slightly awkward eating experience.

For the sake of reviewing the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl, KFC provided me with a gift card. That in no way affected the content of my assessment or any other portion of this piece. Furthermore, the KFC location I ordered from did not know that my items were for the sake of a review.

Altogether, from my closest KFC in Henderson, I ordered a Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl in addition to a Nashville Hot Mac & Cheese Bowl and a Nashville Hot Famous Bowl online. Once I brought them home, I ate the entirety of the Nashville Hot Loaded Fries Bowl, taking notes throughout for the sake of my review. Since I wasn't technically reviewing either of the other two bowls, I ate about half of each afterward and took minimal notes. All of my first-person observations are based on the food that I ordered and ate from this single KFC trip, and were not influenced by any prior experience with the chain.