Hello. Please have a seat. Can I get you anything? A lemonade perhaps? Yes, isn't that refreshing? Let's begin then.
I travel the streets looking for really good fried chicken. I don't care about decent fried chicken, or pretty good fried chicken -- I want really good, excellent fried chicken -- which is sometimes referred to as friend chicken. It's not often I find a friend chicken, but it happens. It happened yesterday.
And where did it happen? In New York at a place called Root and Bone. I'm not going to go into the backgrounds of the chefs/owners. I'm just going to record in these little dispatches of mine that Root and Bone has one of the better fried chickens -- friend chickens -- I've had on this planet.
Let's talk about the skin. It's incredibly flavorful -- one of the finest crusts in the Western Hemisphere. The meat was for the most part flavorful and succulent. There was one minor issue, which was the meat on the breast. The breast was voluptuous, and sometimes it just doesn't seem possible for the flavors of the brine and seasoning to penetrate deeply into the breast meat. Don't get me wrong -- for the most part the Root and Bone breast was good. But deep down in the breasty voluptuousness, while there was always a pleasant poultry flavor, the meat did veer into blandish territory. This might simply be the fate of all breast meat. The good news is that Root and Bone has a delectable Tabasco honey perfect for dipping and smothering. The even better news is that, overall, and certainly when it comes to the thighs, the meat is so flavorful and seductive that no additional accouterments are necessary. What a fine friend chicken.
Root and Bone
East 3rd Street
