by John T. Edge
Deep-Fried Fowlosophy
in preparation for my visit to Barberton, I turned to the work of anthropologist Sidney Mintz. He argues that to have a cuisine, a locale must boast an informed class of eater, able to proclaim the virtues of a particular dish. Of equal importance, eaters who can tell a true rendition of a dish from an imposter must be willing to fend off challenges to the canon. They must be able to, in the case of Barberton chicken, spot the lone KFC drumstick in a bucket of the good stuff from Belgrade Gardens.
By Mintz’s definition, Barberton lays claim to a cuisine. And so does my next destination, Chicago. On the Southside, you’re likely to spy a chicken joint on every fifth block. Typical is Eat N Run, the interior of which is painted to resemble a red-and-white-striped circus tent. Omnipresent is Harold’s Chicken Shack, a local chain with more than thirty locations. The sign at 83rd boasts that Harold’s serves “the chicken that keeps you licking.”
Eat N Run and Harold’s serve the prevailing Chicago style: deep-fried chicken resting atop a couple slices of white bread and a thatch of fries, the whole affair drenched in a torrent of ketchup-sweet hot sauce, and passed to walkup customers through carousels set in Plexiglas. But I’ve learned to love an Italianate variant, dished by Chef Luciano. His story follows.
FOUR
Talking Trash and Chicken with the King of the Mutts
chef Luciano of Gourmet Fried Chicken in Chicago does not suffer fools gladly. Unfortunately, he pegs me for an insufferable fool when, after picking his name out of the yellow pages, I call to ask, “Just what does it mean to serve ‘gourmet fried chicken’?”
After harrumphing his contempt, Luciano bellows, “Who in the hell do you think you are, asking a question like that? You don’t know what gourmet means? It means that I marinate my chicken in garlic and lemon juice for at least a day. It means that I use fresh chicken. Never frozen. It means that I cook fried chicken like a fine Italian restaurant would!”
When I ask, among other things, whether he uses fresh or powdered garlic for the marinade, Luciano lets fly a second fusillade of invective: “Garlic powder? Garlic powder? That’s bullshit! I use fresh garlic, more garlic than any other restaurant in Chicago.” And then he repeats his original query, “Who in the hell do you think you are?”
Before I can stammer an answer, Luciano slams down the phone. With the dial tone still ringing in my ear, I begin plotting a visit to his lair. But first, in the interest of better understanding how one would fry chicken in the manner of an Italian gourmet, I do some research. Here’s what I learn:
Between 1820 and 1920 more than four million Italians immigrated to America, with most arriving between 1880 and 1920. While it was typical for recently arrived immigrants to settle in enclaves staked out by their countrymen, not every Italian flocked to New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s North Beach. Italian men also lit out for the docks of New Orleans, for the coal mining districts of upland Kentucky, for the stockyards of Missouri, Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois. Each destination promised jobs. In exchange for a life of hefting cotton bales or digging coal or gutting swine, immigrants earned their progeny a shot at assimilation, a chance at becoming American.
Typically, when an enclave reached critical mass, one immigrant—perhaps he had been a pasta maker in Naples, maybe he had cured salami in Genoa—would, frustrated by the shortage of Italian foodstuffs, open a corner market to serve his countrymen. Another immigrant, oftentimes a widow in need of funds, might open her home to boarders. And by these simple acts of commerce, the red-and-white-checked-tablecloth Italian restaurants of Middle America were born, as corner markets added plate lunches built around the goods for sale on their shelves, as boardinghouse nonne strove to serve dishes that Italians (not to mention all manner of other newly arrived immigrants) might deem palatable.
In the Midwest, where chicken was a farmhouse specialty, and a bird might easily be penned out back until the time came to wring its neck, fried chicken became a fixture of Italian-run roadhouses. It assumed the status of culinary lingua franca, becoming a dish that bespoke the chicken-in-every-skillet bounty of America. Granted, fried chicken might have been served back home. (The recipe at the end of this chapter is from Cesare Casella, a native of Tuscany, who proclaims a long and proud Tuscan heritage for fried chicken.) But back home in Italy, fried chicken was not considered iconic.
The fried chicken served in these roadhouses became iconic—and a shade less Italian—by means of the American entrepreneurial instinct to codify and then commodify. By serving Romano-crusted fried chicken alongside spaghetti with red sauce, joints like Romine’s of St. Louis, Gino’s of Des Moines, and, in later years, Maniaci’s Café Siciliano of Milwaukee acknowledged their ethnic identity while trumpeting their emergent Americanness.
Chicago, the big-shouldered citadel of opportunity for the working class, was a magnet for Italian immigrants. Some of their old-line restaurants endure to this day. But along the way, more interesting developments came to the fore. That’s where my tempestuous friend Luciano comes in, for, though his claim to Italian lineage turns out to be tentative at best, he cooks some of the best Italian-style fried chicken in the land.
chef Luciano’s four-storefront complex is twenty-odd blocks south of the Loop on Cermak Road, at the heart of a neighborhood dominated by midrise housing projects and fast-food restaurants. There are two entrances to his business. On the corner is Gourmet Fried Chicken. Deeper into the block is another take-away stand, Chef Luciano’s. Plate-glass windows front both, and from those windows glare neon signs. Just inside the vestibule at Chef Luciano’s, I spy a placard that advertises, “We do not fry any food in this kitchen.” I choose the other entrance.
Don Luciano lords over all. While awaiting my audience, I peruse the menus for both businesses. The Chef Luciano side is comparatively luxe. Celebrity glossies and signed testimonials blanket the walls. Meteorologists, anchormen, political functionaries, and super-chef Charlie Trotter all pledge their love of Luciano. Here he dishes up turkey masala pizza, collard greens sautéed with garlic, chicken piri piri, and jumbo scallops napped in Alfredo sauce. Thirty paces west—under the same roof and in a setting that, owing to its cleanliness and stark white paint, can only be described as institutional—the cooks at Gourmet Fried Chicken dish catfish fillets, chicken wings and legs and breasts, and tubs of red beans and basmati rice.
In due time, Luciano emerges from a dining cubbyhole secreted in the bowels of the restaurant where, behind a false mirror, he watches the comings and goings of guests, oftentimes quaffing a balloon of Chianti or a stem of Champagne. I somehow expected to be greeted by a wizened veteran of the restaurant business, one of those nervous men whose diet seems to be restricted to black coffee and cigarette ash. But Luciano is an ox, a gray-haired bruiser with a birthmark that casts a pall over one side of his face, as if he were forever standing astride a shadow.
I ask about the contradictory messages communicated by his enterprises. I expect another tirade. But Luciano has softened. Maybe it is the wine. Maybe it is my praise of his fried chicken, which, while cooling my heels, I ate with great relish. I was not able to isolate anything specifically gourmet about it, but I can tell you that from first bite to last I tasted garlic, and an herb that might well have been thyme added a contrapuntal mustiness, and the bite of lemon cut through what little grease still clung to the crust. The bird that his employees serve rather unceremoniously by way of bulletproof Plexiglas carousels recalls—though it does not quite equal—the transcendent pollo fritto showcased at Beppe, Cesare Casella’s temple of Tuscan cuisine in Manhattan.
soon enough, Luciano invites me into his office and takes me into his confidence. Turns out that, though he looks like he might hail from the southern reach of the Boot, he does not boast a single drop of Italian blood. Luciano was born Dave Gupta in New Delhi, India, and immigrated to the United States in 1964 at the age of twenty-four. By dint of sheer will, he landed a job with Moët & Chandon, the wh
ite-shoe firm that makes and markets Champagne. At first, Luciano thought he had found his life’s work. He reveled in the rich food, the luxe wine.
But while traveling a fourteen-state Midwestern territory he, like legions of salesmen before him, had a bit too much time to think. One day, an isolated observation lodged in his craw: “I saw KFC advertising, ‘We do chicken right!’ and I thought, ‘Now what in the hell does that mean?’” As Luciano’s face flushes with blood, he seizes me by the shoulders. “What they do tastes like crap to me,” he shouts. “Half of America thinks that’s what it tastes like when you do chicken right. That’s bullshit! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!”
When he calms, Luciano turns reflective. “America is a nation of mutts, of strays,” he tells me. “I’m one of them. I’m a mutt who got his start in the restaurant business cooking like I imagined a great Italian chef would. Now people know me for this fried chicken. I tell them, ‘Stay off this stuff,’ I say, ‘Never eat it more than once a week,’ I tell them, ‘It’ll kill you,’ but they keep coming, keep eating fried chicken when I’m trying to convince them to go next door, to try some rapini, taste some eggplant. But what can you do? This is America. We have free will. At least my fried chicken is worth the investment in cholesterol.”
I’m beginning to like this guy. What’s more, I know that I like his chicken. I have come to appreciate his rant for what it is: pride in craft, pride in tradition. Never mind that the tradition is not his own. After we shake hands, and he withdraws to the Chef Luciano side of the business, I double back for a two-piece drumstick snack. Perhaps he wouldn’t approve, but I just can’t help myself.
Italian-American Fried Chicken
TUSCANY BY WAY OF CHICAGO AND MANHATTAN
Italian fried chicken is no faddish faux-fusion dish. While researching this book I came across a recipe for Fried Chicken Italienne from the White House Cookbook of 1887: “Make common batter; mix into it a cupful of chopped tomatoes, one onion chopped, some minced parsley, salt and pep- (continued)per. Cut up young, tender chickens, dry them well, and dip each piece into the batter; then fry brown in plenty of butter, in a thick bottom frying pan. Serve with tomato sauce.” Better is this Tuscan fried chicken courtesy of Cesare Casella, chef and proprietor of Beppe in Manhattan. Think of it as an homage to Chef Luciano of Gourmet Fried Chicken in Chicago (who laughed when I asked if he would share his own recipe).
■ 3-to-4-pound chicken, cut into 10 pieces and
trimmed of extra fat
■ Juice of 2 lemons
■ Peanut oil
■ 2 cups all-purpose flour
■ Salt and pepper to taste
■ 2 eggs, beaten lightly and seasoned with salt
and pepper
■ 2 sprigs fresh thyme
■ 2 sprigs fresh rosemary
■ 4 cloves garlic
■ 1 lemon, cut into wedges
Squeeze lemon juice over the chicken and rub it into the flesh. Cover the chicken with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
Remove from the refrigerator an hour before cooking so that the chicken reaches room temperature.
Pour the oil into a large frying pan until it is one-third full. Heat the oil to 350°. It should not smoke. Mix the flour with some salt and pepper. Dredge the chicken pieces in the flour, then dip them into the beaten eggs. Add the chicken to the pan. Do not over-crowd the pan; there should be plenty of room between pieces. Let the oil drop to a simmer of about 325°. Cook for 15 minutes, or until an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white.
During the last 2 minutes before removing the chicken from pan, turn up the heat to 375° to crisp. Then add the herbs and garlic for about a minute. Remove the chicken and herbs from the oil and drain on paper towels. Sprinkle more salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze fresh lemon, and serve on a platter topped with the herbs. Serves 4.
Chicken and Stars
if Colonel Sanders was once the poster boy for fried chicken, who or what might replace him tomorrow? What symbol or logo can encompass an America where Italian fried chicken as served in Chicago is cooked by a native of India and sold as in African American takeout stands?
The complexity of the question heightens if you ponder Latin fried chicken. In Los Angeles, I investigate the emerging Hispanic fried chicken phenomenon, spending a good bit of time at a fast-food chain based in Guatemala, which features a rootin’, tootin’, ten-gallon-hat-wearin’ chickadee mascot that evokes a conjoining of Big Bird and Marmaduke.
Los Angeles proves the ideal place to consider iconic images: I glimpse forty-foot muffler men balanced atop garages, and blonde figureheads fronting beauty shops. More to the point, in Santa Monica, I spy a lumbering Oldsmobile with a five-foot rooster head and red wattle on the roof and a rococo fiberglass plume trailing from the trunk.
And on the edge of Koreatown, I visit the studio of graphic designer Amy Inouye, savior of Chicken Boy, a twenty-two-foot chicken-with-bucket sculpture that once graced a local fast-food outlet. Though Inouye has room to store only his bust on the premises, to view Chicken Boy against the tag-sale-in-upheaval backdrop of her studio is to know that a post-modern fried chicken icon may be in the making.
FIVE
Viva Pollo Campero
back in the dark ages, before Pollo Campero opened its first U.S. location, flights to Los Angeles from Guatemala City or San Salvador smelled to high heaven. And heaven smelled a lot like fried chicken.
At the time, it was de rigueur among Latin expatriates returning from a visit to Guatemala or El Salvador, Ecuador, or Nicaragua, to leave their clothes behind when packing for an in-bound U.S. flight, and fill their valises, their backpacks, their duffels with Pollo Campero fried chicken. No Pollo Campero? No hugs for the prodigal son, no kisses for the wayward daughter.
By the mid-1990s, the smell of pollo frito proved so overwhelming that the region’s primary carrier, TACA airlines, approached Pollo Campero company officials about hermetically sealing all chicken boxes intended for international transport. Pollo Campero demurred, but the inquiry spurred the Guatemalan company, in business since 1971, to consider opening stateside locations to serve a burgeoning Hispanic population.
in April of 2002, to great acclaim and a salsa backbeat, Pollo Campero opened its first U.S. outlet in Los Angeles. During opening week the wait exceeded six hours. Satellite trucks idled on the street, fronted by breathless on-the-scene correspondents documenting the traffic jams that ensnarled Olympic Boulevard. Canny entrepreneurs bought chicken by the gross and sold it for two bucks a drumstick to cash-flush devotees who just couldn’t wait in line another moment for a taste of home.
Now the wait tracks at about six minutes—from the time I place my order, to the moment I have my tray and am bound for the pico de gallo bar. On this Thursday afternoon, it’s just me, a crew of roofers from the Dominican Republic, and a party of birthday celebrants. I try to engage the roofers in conversation about ethnic identity, about fried chicken, about whether fast-food flour tortillas are preferable to fast-food brown-’n’-serve rolls, but my Spanish fails me, and I can’t quite get them to understand my intent.
“Do you consider yourself to be a fan of Pollo Campero?” I ask. “Are you happy to be here? Or is this just another fried chicken joint?” One of the men—whose ability to span the Spanish-English language chasm is obviously more well honed than mine—looks at me with the same wary expression I must wear when those clipboard-wielding survey-takers approach me at the mall. I have a little more luck with the adolescent birthday girl and friends who occupy a corner phalanx of orange fiberglass booths. Above them arch yellow and orange balloons, and behind them a plume of flags frames a larger-than-life rendering of the restaurant’s Stetson-wearing mascot, El Pollito Campero. (Call it a new world order as imagined by south-of-the-border poultrymen: the banner of Guatemala is at the center, Mexico is at bottom right, and the U.S. is at bottom left.) On the table is box upon box of chicken. When I approach the birthday girl
, a woman I assume to be her mother smiles warmly, shushes the kids, and, before I have a chance to speak, leads the throng in a chant. “ Pollo Campero es Guatemala!” they shout. “ Pollo Campero es el mejor pollo!”
the chicken I sample is coated in a ferrous-brown crust of lacy texture and is, from first bite to last, juicy and crispy and undeniably good. It’s also virtually greaseless. But as good as it is, as much as I enjoy the subtle hint of adobo (the Worcestershire sauce of Hispanic cookery), this chicken does not a phenomenon make. And neither do the rice, the beans, or the salsa verde. Ditto the rice-water drink known as horchata, which, even to an uneducated palate like mine, tastes too much of gritty cinnamon to be truly refreshing. But Pollo Campero is a phenomenon. And a wildly successful one at that. Since opening its first Los Angeles franchise, the company has, as of my visit, added two more locations in Los Angeles, and one in Houston. By the time you read this, there may be three in Boise, Idaho.
Back home, Pollo Campero is a pop culture icon, and El Pollito Campero, the mascot, commands his own television cartoon series, sharing billing with Super Camp, his scientist alter ego. Stateside, many believe Pollo Campero to be the Great Brown Hope, the company that will tap into a kind of pan-Latino pride in place and tradition, and take on American-style fast food on its own turf.
Though fried chicken has long been a part of the Latin diet, what seems to capture the attention of a new generation of consumers—and investors—is the Latin yen for fried chicken complemented by the American marketing precepts of cheap and consistent and ever-ready delivery. “We are cheeky, eh?” said Rodolfo Jiménez, Pollo Campero’s director of international strategic marketing, to a New York Times reporter, soon after the first Los Angeles franchise opened. “At the end of the day, we are selling fried chicken, and what is more American than that?”