Fried Chicken (5 page)

 

 

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?”

i won't saddle you with statistics, like the fifty-eight percent increase in our nation's Hispanic population from 1990 to 2000. I won't burden you with the knowledge that, during the same period, Hispanic buying power rose from just over five percent to nearly ten percent of U.S. buying power. No, that would be boring. You know the impact of Hispanic tastes and pocketbooks each time you walk down the grocery store aisle and spot cans of nopalitos beside the green beans, bottles of tamarindo amidst the colas.

Over the course of a year spent wandering the country, I've eaten—in addition to the Italian and Serbian fried chicken already discussed—Korean fried chicken in Baltimore, Vietnamese fried chicken in San Francisco, Indian fried chicken in Dallas, and Szechuan fried chicken in Minneapolis. More to the point, I've eaten Latin fried chicken at a Mexican bodega in Atlanta, at a white-tablecloth bôite in Chicago, and at a Cuban coffeehouse in Miami.

The best Latin fried chicken I tasted was at New Caporal, a fast-food take-away in New York City where they marinate chicken in the garlic-and-citrus concoction known as mojo, deep fry it, and pile it atop an aerie of curlicue fries. (They even boast a holster-and-six-shooter-wielding mascot that recalls El Pollito.) Problem is, New Caporal, like the rest of these chicken purveyors, is singular. Each is a fluke, a conspiracy of talent and enterprise that somehow produces a transcendent piece of fried chicken.

Pollo Campero, on the other hand, is no fluke. It is a corporation dedicated to consistency of product, to sameness of taste. In Latin America, where the company has nearly 200 stores, it sells chicken to parents by way of their children, who are, in turn, seduced by the Saturday-morning superheroes El Pollito and Super Camp. In the United States, Pollo Campero sells itself as an answer to KFC, a taste of home that all Latins can afford and that, if Pollo Campero has its way, all Latins will come to claim as their own.

And therein lies their genius, for what Pollo Campero is
truly
selling to émigrés is a sort of pan-national pride: By the very act of eating this Latin product you are remaking your American experience on your own terms. And at a time when the majority of the line workers in the American poultry industry are Hispanic, in a day when salsa and ketchup do battle for primacy alongside tortillas and white bread, the market is theirs to seize.

 

 

have you ever eaten chicken that was barbecued, battered, and fried? Since I first tasted pork ribs prepared that way at Little Dooey's in Columbus, Mississippi, I've been searching for a chicken analogue.

At Stevie's on the Strip in Los Angeles, they once smoked their birds before frying them, but quit because, in the words of the cashier, “liquid smoke got too expensive.” I plotted a trek to Simply Southern in Las Vegas, reputedly famous for “hickory fried chicken.” But when I phoned, the number had been disconnected. I made a return trip to AQ Chicken in Spring-dale, Arkansas, where I had once liked their “chicken over the coals.” AQ works the dish backward, frying and then char-grilling. This time around, my thigh tasted more acrid than smoky. I have yet to make it to Keaton's in Cleveland, North Carolina, but I'm in no hurry, because I understand that, instead of smoking and then frying, they do nothing more than fry chickens and then dunk them in barbecue sauce.