Our stretch of Sunset Park isn't particularly glamorous. I often need to get my milk and eggs from Mobil On the Run, occasionally stocking up on cans of Chef Boyardee Beefaroni for my more desperate moments. Our closest supermarket is a National, where a teenage kid standing by the entrance waits with numbered clothespins to check the bags customers walk in with. And my house is only a few blocks from an astonishing variety of fast food joints -- McDonald's, Taco Bell, Subway, Blimpie's, White Castle, and KFC. As much as I used to love me some KFC when I was a kid, my last encounter with the Sunset Park Colonel was a contentious one -- the foyer entrance smelled like someone had been pissing in it (which I'm sure someone had), and my oil-soaked, soft-skinned Original Recipe was nowhere near as good as it smelled. Disillusioned (with emphasis on the "ill"), I decided not to subject myself to such gastronomical masochism anymore.
But there's a new kid in town, and though he has the misfortune of wearing an apron that looks an awful lot like a diaper, my new spicy Latin lover has seduced the fast-food hater in me into remission. Last night, my roommate and I left the house on a whim for a party in the West Village, chugging two glasses of cava before we got on the train. I had one more glass of champagne at the bar and proceeded to sink sleepily into a booth for the rest of the evening, propping my boots up on the weathered leather. The next afternoon, on the hangover walk to the greengrocer for fruit salad ingredients, the devil in me said to my roommate, "Wouldn't fried chicken be great right now?"
"Oh yeah, we could get KFC on the way home," my roommate said.
"No, no, I meant Pollo Campero."
Lucky for me, my roommate is easily tempted by evil food suggestions, and after we made the fruit salad, we promptly refrigerated it and headed back out in the rain to get fried chicken.
We each ordered a three piece meal with two sides and took a seat at one of the bright orange tables in their extremely clean, pleasant dining room. Minutes later, a green uniformed worker delivered a tray with our plastic plates. For a fast food joint, I have to say that Pollo Campero's chicken tastes very fresh, never exceedingly greasy. Every crevice, every square millimeter of surface area is saturated with the reddish-orange blend of their own savory, fragrant, distinctly Latin blend of spices, encasing tender, moist flesh. And the skin! Oh, fried chicken skin, how appalled my mother would be if she knew how much I loved you -- so intensely well-seasoned, so wafer-thin and crisp, so rich and without starchy excess. Let's face it, fried chicken is all about the yummy, crispy skin. The equally crisp, light, and very hot tostones with a gentle sprinkling of salt were better than most fries I've had, especially dipped in the excellent roasted green tomatillo salsa from their generous salsa bar. Unfortunately, the dinner rolls are a travesty, they never seem to have biscuits when I'm there, and the tortillas are just tortillas. The real revelation comes with the beans -- tender pintos are stewed in a tasty chorizo-packed sofrito sauce. As my roommate said, "This may be the best fast food side dish ever." Their cole slaw and mashed potatoes with gravy taste like concessions to their adopted home -- certainly not worse than KFC's, but not an improvement either. I wish there were more veggie options for sides -- a little green goes a long way when you're eating this many fats, proteins and starches in one sitting.
The folks at Pollo Campero are not exactly Ray Kroc's model of efficiency -- today, I had to wait 8 minutes while they finished preparing the mashed potatoes (which I'm sure meant reheating the frozen package). And when I placed an order for a 12 piece bucket the day of our Super Bowl watching party, the lady at the counter told me they ran out of chicken -- could I wait 9 minutes for a fresh batch? I had about 20 minutes to get back in time for the start of the game (which I could really have cared less about, but I wanted the guests to have time to appreciate the chicken before the football could steal their attention). I ran out the door with my square handled box o' chicken and managed to catch a steamy, super-packed bus back home in the nick of time, overwhelming all the crushed folks packed in there with the fatty fragrance of fried food. The happy party guests agreed through their munching -- nine minutes is a small price to pay for incredibly fresh, crisp fried chicken and a guarantee that my dinner hasn't been congealing, unloved, under a heat lamp.
Grade: A-
Total: $7.33 per person for a three piece meal with two sides and a soda
Will I return? If I can manage to walk into Pollo Campero instead of Tacos Matamoros, my favorite taqueria across the street, then yes. I'm really into inviting people over to share a bucket of chicken and a salad while ignoring a major sporting event on TV.
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Speaking of TV, maybe I should have a Tacos Matamoros Contender finale party. Do you guys watch? Best show EVAH. Go PETAH!
It seems every three months or so, I selectively forget that KFC has horrible horrible chicken. There's something GOOD about it that lingers...I think it's that initial wave of flavor that you get when your tongue first makes contact. But from that point on, it's all downhill. The skin is particularly disappointing...it's always soggy, greasy patches of batter clinging half-heartedly to the skin in a pretty good imitation of mange.
I have no latin gods of chicken to visit here...sigh.
There's just something about "ethnic" fried chicken. :) For some reason I find the chicken wings from the (not quite) "American" menu of my local Chinese-American takeout place (the kind that has photos of all the dishes above the counter) to be amazing. I'm not sure what gives them that special taste...msg, cooking oil that has had egg rolls and crab rangoon and everything else in it, whatever...but it's among the most crispy and savory chicken I've had. I hope I get to try Pollo Campero sometime!