Fried Chicken (4 page)

late that same afternoon, on my way to the airport, I place a call to Mayor Hart. I'm thinking that he may not have tried the backs from Belgrade Gardens and that I may be able to help him see the error of his ways. But, according to his secretary, Mayor Hart has no time for me. When pressed, she refuses to posit an opinion about whether His Honor has ever even had the pleasure of gnawing a chicken back.

 

 

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 white-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.