Midtown Lunch

If you were at FYF Fest this year you likely noticed that the food options were the best they’ve ever been at the L.A. based music festival.  Thanks to Nic Adler and Goldenvoice a handful of well known L.A. restaurants (like Dune, Top Round, Donut Friend and Free Range LA) set up alongside music festival mainstays (like Spicy Pie, arepas, corn dogs and crab fries).  But one fried chicken vendor I stumbled upon that weekend was neither of those things.  They were set up in the shadows of the L.A. Colisseum, at the very very end of a long line of nameless stands selling random stuff like aguas frescas and meat on a stick.  The makeshift booth looked like it could have been dropped in from a church fund raiser, but they had boxes with logos on them that seemed to indicate a real business.  Their name?  Krispy Krunchy Chicken.

To say I was intrigued would be a severe understatement. The whole thing felt like a Los Pollos Hermanos situation.  That thing where you see a fast food brand that looks so real, so good, it has to be an actual thing- but not understanding why you’ve never heard of it before. I found out from the guy in charge of the booth that it was a franchise of a fried chicken company you see all over the south (mostly in gas stations.)  I asked so many questions he accused me of being a narc from the corporate office checking up on them.  That sounds like the best job ever.

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Dominoes atrocities aside, pizza and fried chicken are not exactly two things you might associate with each other. New York style pizza and buffalo wings? Sure. But individual size, quick fired Italian style pizzas alongside southern style spicy fried chicken doesn’t necessarily feel as simpatico.  After all, you wouldn’t expect 800 Degrees to turn out a delicious fried chicken any more than you’d expect Popeye’s to start selling a perfectly cooked margherita. And yet that’s exactly what you’ll find at the newly opened Pizza Romana on La Brea.

Formerly Cube Marketplace and Cafe, and still owned by the same people, this new fast casual pizzeria is clearly meant to compete with the new wave of quick serve pizza joints that have sprung up all over L.A. in the past 3 years. The pizzas are mostly $9 and $10, and come out quick with ingredients like proscuitto, broccolini, and buffalo mozzarella. But there is one important Cube holdover that differentiates Pizza Romana from 800 Degrees, Pitfire, Blaze, and the rest.

Their fried chicken.

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When the first news of Choco Chicken started leaking out on the interwebs I have to admit I was instantly excited.  Not because chocolate covered fried chicken sounds good to me (it doesn’t), but because I’ve got a ton of respect for Umami Burger and 800 Degrees. They might not serve up your favorite burger or pizza in the city, but both chains are genius ideas and both taste great for what they are. It helps, of course, that I love the mix of sweet and salty.  And I knew in my heart of artery clogged hearts that the concept of a chocolate fried chicken would be safe in the hands of whoever came up with those other two ideas.

Fast forward to now.  Chocochicken is now open in Downtown L.A. and I can confirm that the chicken is pretty much everything I imagined it would be. (Did I mention that I knew it was going to be good?) The restaurant itself?  Well, that’s a different story.  And it seems like a lot of people still have questions they need answered before they’re willing to fork over the cash for whatever it is that chocochicken is.

So, for those of you who haven’t taken the dive yet (or those of you who have and are still confused) here is every question you had about Chocochicken, answered.

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Hart & the Hunter is one of my favorite restaurants in all of L.A., not just for their smoked trout, their ridiculous biscuits, and their addictive chicken cracklins. But also because you could get at least two of those three things during breakfast and lunch, even though it was pretty clear from the beginning that they were probably only serving food during the day to satisfy some kind of contract with their hotel landlords. Naturally the lunch menu also sported a few of their more popular salad offerings (brussels, cauliflower, pickled shrimp) and you could get their hangar steak as a salad’ish bowl. Certainly not the food that earned them a reputation as one of the coolest restaurants in the city, but good enough to get us hardcore fans to schedule lunch meetings and coffee meet ups there.

Well, just short of their one year anniversary, Hart & the Hunter has revamped their lunch menu and it now actually has a few things that might make the dinner crowd a bit jealous!

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Completely sick of food trucks?  You might want to stop reading.  Sick of food trucks with stupid names?  Stop reading. Sick of gluttony?  Stop reading.  Sick of food bloggers getting excited about disgusting creations that nobody who doesn’t hate themselves would ever be caught eating?  Stop reading.  Hate fried chicken and waffles?  Stop reading.  Mom, is that you?  Stop reading. Don’t want to see the food version of Leaving Las Vegas?  Stop reading.  Because if I die anytime in the next month, they will likely point to this lunch as a major cause. I’m not saying it will get blamed the way Marilyn Manson did for Columbine… actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying.  The only difference is, this lunch will truly be to blame. Don’t want to throw up in your own mouth?  Stop reading.

Last week I found myself at the recently re-opened food truck lot on Washington and Overland, and by some amazing bit of luck two trucks both serving fried chicken and waffles were parked side by side.  Well, maybe “luck” is the wrong word for it. By some amazing bit of the-gods-conspiring-against-me-and-my-overall-health, the Slap Yo Mama Truck and the Trailer Park Truck were parked next to each other, making a fried chicken and waffle battle practically mandated by Fortuna.  Aka, it had to be done.  You know… for science.

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I don’t hate chicken, but I do reserve the right to hate L.A.’s obsession with chicken. I’ve never met so many people who love chicken, or (the horror) will only eat chicken. Fat man cannot live on chicken alone (unless it’s deep fried, covered in garlic sauce, or sauteed with french fries.) Ok, so maybe hate is a strong word.  I don’t hate chickenterians, some of my best friends are chickentarians. I just like to make fun of them for missing out on all the joys of beef, lamb, seafood, goat (yes goat!), and of course pork.  So if the future me had told the past me that I would end up eating at a place called Chicken Lady Cafe, a catering specialist in the shadow of the Beverly Center, and love it, the old me would have proactively punched the new me in the face.

Chicken Lady Cafe?  Catering?  The Beverly Center?  How did this happen?  I’ll tell you how it happened.  Chicken. Fingers.

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I didn’t grow up eating fried chicken in California, so the nostalgia factor of the Pioneer Chicken on Olympic and San Vicente is a little lost on me.  I don’t have any fond memories of eating the grease bomb that is Pioneer as a child, nor did I ever go through the shock of discovering that my local Pioneer had been replaced by a Popeyes, or feel any sadness when the original Echo Park location closed a few years ago.  And even though the location on Olympic is one of only 3 locations left (and the only within Midtown Lunch’ing boundaries), there are some who claim that it doesn’t taste the same as the original locations.  It’s not a surprise considering that the actual chain itself hasn’t really existed since the 90s, and the remaining franchises are all owned and operated independently.

But none of that really mattered when Lunch’er Garrett recommended Pioneer as one of his favorite places to eat lunch in Mid City.   I had driven by that kitschy chuck wagon sign so many times, trying to think of a good excuse to stuff my face with fried chicken that couldn’t possible be as good as Honey’s Kettle, or Roscoe’s, or even, ironically, Popeye’s. (I freakin love Popeye’s.) Garrett’s rec was just the excuse I was looking for, and now that I’ve been I can think of 5 amazing reasons I’ll be back to Pioneer.  (And one of them involves Korean fermented soy bean soup.)

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