Fried Chicken Read Online Free PDF Page A

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