At the Southern Skillet, a meat-and-two mainstay in Roswell, there's a fine collection of skillets hanging on the wall and a big one dangling from the ceiling like a cast-iron mobile. None figure in one of the restaurant's specialties, fried chicken.

"We use a deep-fryer," says manager Charles Paris. "You couldn't fry enough chicken in a skillet for our lunch crowd."

Louie Favorite/Staff (ENLARGE)

'I'm not against pan-frying, but it takes a little more technical skill to regulate the heat,' says executive chef Ryan Cobb of the Colonnade, who deep-fries.

Louie Favorite/Staff (ENLARGE)

Lenn Storey, owner of Son's Place in Inman Park, pan-fries chicken.

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It's the same story at the Silver Skillet in Midtown. And at Matthews Cafeteria in Tucker and the Busy Bee Cafe in West End and the Rexall Grill in Duluth — and Paschal's and Mary Mac's and the Colonnade. Almost every eatery in Atlanta known for its fried chicken deep-fries the bird, plunging it into a vat of scalding oil like a basket of curly fries, instead of using the pan-fried method many Southerners fondly recall from Sunday dinners past.

"Take a chicken and you kill it and you put it in a skillet," country musician Merle Travis once sang.

The tune has changed.

Pan-fried chicken, one of the South's most iconic dishes, is in danger of becoming an heirloom. Not only do most restaurants deep-fry these days, because it's faster and easier, but fewer home cooks reach for a skillet anymore.

"People don't fry at home because it's just too greasy and messy," says Nathalie Dupree, the cookbook author who lived in Atlanta for years. "When you fry chicken, you have to wash your hair or you're going to smell like fried chicken in bed that night."

Even John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, the preservation group based at Ole Miss, admits that he deep-fries.

"I get better results deep-frying in a Dutch oven," he says, hastening to add that he has the utmost respect for skillet artists.

Pan-fried chicken and deep-fried chicken are different animals, Southern food experts say, and one isn't necessarily better than the other.

But the tug of tradition leaves some restaurateurs sounding almost apologetic for ditching the skillet.

"Pan-fried tastes better, and we'd do it if we could," says Drew Buckner of Buckner's Family Restaurant in Jackson. "But we fry tons of chicken a year. We'd never keep up."

At Thelma's Kitchen in downtown Atlanta, they tried to keep the faith. "We did it with a skillet when we started out," says David Grundy, "but we had to go to a fryer. It's just modern times. People come in for lunch and they have to get back to work, so you can't cook to order."

"At a restaurant, you can't do it like my mama did it," agrees James Paige of the Collard Green Cafe in DeKalb County, who remembers his mother's Sunday dinners of pan-fried chicken, greens and Uncle Ben's rice.

Don't tell Mama, but he says he likes deep-fried just as well.

In truth, a lot of people do. They think it makes a crispier crust and leaves the meat moister.

"It instantly sears the chicken and locks in the juices," says Ryan Cobb of the Colonnade in Atlanta. "I'm not against pan-frying, but it takes a little more technical skill to regulate the heat."

Dupree thinks it takes a lot more skill. She has collected 18 versions of fried chicken for a new book, "Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking." Every time she breaks in a new recipe tester, she counts on a few practice runs before the chicken turns out right.

"You can't just pick up a skillet and expect to do it," she says. "My mother never learned how to do it. I still remember her raw chicken."

One of the few Atlanta lunchrooms that still uses a skillet to fry chicken is Son's Place, a soul food cafe across from the Inman Park MARTA station. Lenn Storey, the owner, is proud of the skillet he calls the Big One — so proud that he had a picture window built where customers can watch it work its magic.

"That's my daddy's skillet," he says of the 25-inch monster that covers four burners and takes two people to hoist.

His daddy was Deacon Burton, Atlanta's best-known fried chicken master, who stood at the stove for decades at Burton's Grill, a paper chef's hat on his head. Storey inherited his skillets and, most diners agree, his skill.

Storey's wife, Beverlyn, is pretty good with a pan, too. Growing up nearby in the Edgewood neighborhood, she learned to fry chicken from her mother.

"But I don't think my sister's ever fried a chicken," she laments. "My stepsister, either. People today don't want to work like that. They're too busy. It's too much of a chore."

There was a time when pan-fried chicken was featured in every Southern eatery in town. Nowadays, it's more likely to be found in high-end restaurants. At places like JCT Kitchen, Horseradish Grill and Restaurant Eugene, Southern fried chicken is presented like a piece of classical repertory at the symphony. Diners who may never have seasoned a skillet pay as much as $29.50 a plate to experience what the real thing tasted like before Col. Sanders stuck it in a bucket.

No establishment celebrates the dish as enthusiastically as Watershed, the Decatur restaurant that draws crowds to its fried chicken nights every Tuesday. It doesn't appear on the menu. People just know to ask for it. For $19, they get a plate heaped with a breast, thigh, wing and drumstick, with mashed potatoes, green beans and two buttery biscuits on the side.

Chef Scott Peacock's recipe, which appears in his cookbook, "The Gift of Southern Cooking," is the melding of two ideas. He soaks the chicken in brine and then in buttermilk, a technique he remembers from his Alabama childhood. Then it's fried in lard and sweet butter, with a slice of country ham for flavor, a method used by his late mentor and co-author, Edna Lewis, who picked it up on the farm in Virginia.

"It would be much easier to put the chicken in a basket, drop it in oil and set a timer," Peacock says. "But you wouldn't get the same results. Deep-fried chicken is cooked under pressure. You may get a crispier crust, but you also tend to get skin underneath that's wet and flabby."

There's another reason Peacock uses a pan.

"I want to keep this tradition alive," he says.

Actually, he tweaked one tradition.

At Watershed, they don't fry chicken in black skillets. They use heavy-gauge stainless steel pans by Paderno — from Italy.