The Search for the Perfect Fried Chicken : Birds With Soul

The same factors that make fried chicken the most democratic of foods also make it among the hardest to judge. Where barbecue is Dionysian--one slab of ribs might dazzle with intense smokiness, another with jerkylike texture, a third with its peppery sauce--fried chicken is Apollonian, always measured against a classical ideal. Any minimally good fried chicken will be moist but not oily, encased in a thin golden crust, and seasoned in a way that enhances but does not overwhelm the delicate taste of the meat. Even a perfect plate of chicken may not leap out and peck you on the nose as a paradigm.

For a cook, fried chicken is a level playing field, dependent less on the cost of ingredients than on their honesty, demanding more sensitivity than formal training. Chicken carefully fried at home will always taste best--chicken must be cooked slowly, restaurant food served quickly--but while no fast-food joints serve decent fried chicken, nearly all soul-food joints do.

What’s hard to find is great fried chicken. Fowl play!

So when I realized three of the soul-food restaurants loved best had gone to the great greens pot in the sky, I had to restrain myself from rushing rightout to the fourth, which is in Atlanta, Ga.

Even in New Orleans things aren’t the same. Last year, I found soul-food master Buster Holmes leaning against a counter in the sterile shopping center where he now runs the fast-food gumbo concession. (“Oh no,” Buster said, “Can’t do that chicken here. They’d throw me right out of the mall with all that garlic.”)

When somebody torched the chicken shack that made not only the spiciest crust in Los Angeles but my all-time favorite dirty rice, it took me a month or two to stop muttering about the death penalty for arsonists. I resolved to find something as good as the late Cyril’s or Dorothy’s Soul Nook, even if I had to devote the better part of a week to eating fried chicken.

Did I wing it? I did: 21 chickens in all.

I ate chicken wings and grits at the Boulevard Cafe down by the Crenshaw Mall, and afterwards a chicken snack at Bertha’s, where the musky greens are fine; I drove to Green’s in Hollywood for its all-you-can-eat chicken special, which was, er, bountiful, and to Ruth Reichl’s house for a franchise-chicken taste-off that seemed a little like Schick Center avoidance therapy for fried-chicken abuse. I wrapped a waffle around a crisp chicken leg at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles and dragged it through maple syrup. (It sounded like a good idea at the time.)

I had lunch at Stevie’s on the Strip, which looks like a fast-food place but isn’t all that fast and has surprisingly good smoked fried-chicken as well as awesome black-eyed peas. I went to Jay’s Family Soul Food & Car Wash in Compton, where I discovered they had no fried chicken at all.

Soul-fried chicken is not really a sit-down restaurant kind of food in Los Angeles, and people will often confess they haven’t gone out for it in years. The swankiest soul kitchens, Joshua’s (on Manchester) and Harold & Belle’s (on Jefferson), don’t serve the stuff at all. So where’s the best?

When pressed, a shop owner in Inglewood or a schoolteacher in Lynwood will probably direct you to the extremely suburban Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch (4325 Glencoe Ave., Marina del Rey; (213) 578-1005), a close local equivalent to a respectable Southern tearoom. There are at least some ferns here, and lemonade served in Mason jars. You wait in a line that snakes from the door, past a giant diorama picturing the owners with various Lakers and television stars, to the steam table where you order cafeteria style. The fried chicken is big and meaty like the clientele--on weekends it looks as if half the tables are taken up with outsize bodybuilders--but the crust is often doughy and bland. Great macaroni and cheese, though. Meat loaf or smothered chicken in oniony gravy, dishes that hold a while, might be better choices.

Maurice’s Snack ‘n Chat (5553 W. Pico Blvd., L.A.; (213) 931-3877) is where a screenwriter will take you for chicken, the kind of place you might see Gavin McLeod spooning up banana pudding or Chad Everett basking in the carefully calculated funk. (Snack ‘n Chat is by far the most expensive soul-food joint in town, but at $10 it’s still pretty cheap.) Pan-fried bird is cut up into weirdly shaped pieces here, possibly so Tone-Loc can eat it with a knife and fork when he comes in. And though the greaselessness might make the chicken seem a little dry at first, each bite bursts with fresh flavor. This could be as close as fried chicken ever gets to health food, a leg up on the competition. Corn muffins are exceptional, crisp-crusted and melting, and remember to order the phenomenal corn pudding they call spoonbread when you reserve (at least two hours in advance).

From the street, Mae’s (6200 S. Crenshaw Blvd., L.A.; (213) 971-9227) is the most forbidding of restaurants, a fortified grim gray building attached to a grim gray motel on a grim gray stretch of Crenshaw, but come on in; it’s cheerful inside. When your hen finally shows up--it takes 20 minutes to a half hour, which is an encouraging sign--the wizened little limbs might look forbidding, dirt-brown and wrinkly, but the sandy, peppery crust conceals moist fresh meat, among the best birds in town. You get a stack of savory cornmeal pancakes with it. A clear case of not judging a cluck by its cover.

The Trendy Cafe (4769 W. Adams Blvd., L.A.; (213) 733-9275)--on the site of the old Chef Rose Eat Shop, where I once saw Aretha Franklin drink a glass of lemonade--has cactus in the window, its lamp shades still covered with plastic and only two autographed photos on the clean wall, one of them of the guy who does weather on Channel 5. There’s a Ghettoburger on the menu (“That means it comes with fries,” the waiter said). The tart black-eyed peas are the best in town. And the fried chicken? Huge pieces; crunchy, spicy crust not shy of garlic; juicy but not that spurting thing that happens sometime; full-on taste of bird.