Fried Chicken Read Online Free PDF Page B

based in Guatemala, which features a rootin’, tootin’, ten-gallon-hat-wearin’ chickadee mascot that evokes a conjoining of Big Bird and Marmaduke.
    Los Angeles proves the ideal place to consider iconic images: I glimpse forty-foot muffler men balanced atop garages, and blonde figureheads fronting beauty shops. More to the point, in Santa Monica, I spy a lumbering Oldsmobile with a five-foot rooster head and red wattle on the roof and a rococo fiberglass plume trailing from the trunk.
    And on the edge of Koreatown, I visit the studio of graphic designer Amy Inouye, savior of Chicken Boy, a twenty-two-foot chicken-with-bucket sculpture that once graced a local fast-food outlet. Though Inouye has room to store only his bust on the premises, to view Chicken Boy against the tag-sale-in-upheaval backdrop of her studio is to know that a post-modern fried chicken icon may be in the making.

FIVE

    Viva Pollo Campero
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    back in the dark ages, before Pollo Campero opened its first U.S. location, flights to Los Angeles from Guatemala City or San Salvador smelled to high heaven. And heaven smelled a lot like fried chicken.
    At the time, it was de rigueur among Latin expatriates returning from a visit to Guatemala or El Salvador, Ecuador, or Nicaragua, to leave their clothes behind when packing for an in-bound U.S. flight, and fill their valises, their backpacks, their duffels with Pollo Campero fried chicken. No Pollo Campero? No hugs for the prodigal son, no kisses for the wayward daughter.
    By the mid-1990s, the smell of pollo frito proved so overwhelming that the region’s primary carrier, TACA airlines, approached Pollo Campero company officials about hermetically sealing all chicken boxes intended for international transport. Pollo Campero demurred, but the inquiry spurred the Guatemalan company, in business since 1971, to consider opening stateside locations to serve a burgeoning Hispanic population.
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    in April of 2002, to great acclaim and a salsa backbeat, Pollo Campero opened its first U.S. outlet in Los Angeles. During opening week the wait exceeded six hours. Satellite trucks idled on the street, fronted by breathless on-the-scene correspondents documenting the traffic jams that ensnarled Olympic Boulevard. Canny entrepreneurs bought chicken by the gross and sold it for two bucks a drumstick to cash-flush devotees who just couldn’t wait in line another moment for a taste of home.
    Now the wait tracks at about six minutes—from the time I place my order, to the moment I have my tray and am bound for the pico de gallo bar. On this Thursday afternoon, it’s just me, a crew of roofers from the Dominican Republic, and a party of birthday celebrants. I try to engage the roofers in conversation about ethnic identity, about fried chicken, about whether fast-food flour tortillas are preferable to fast-food brown-’n’-serve rolls, but my Spanish fails me, and I can’t quite get them to understand my intent.
    â€œDo you consider yourself to be a fan of Pollo Campero?” I ask. “Are you happy to be here? Or is this just another fried chicken joint?” One of the men—whose ability to span the Spanish-English language chasm is obviously more well honed than mine—looks at me with the same wary expression I must wear when those clipboard-wielding survey-takers approach me at the mall. I have a little more luck with the adolescent birthday girl and friends who occupy a corner phalanx of orange fiberglass booths. Above them arch yellow and orange balloons, and behind them a plume of flags frames a larger-than-life rendering of the restaurant’s Stetson-wearing mascot, El Pollito Campero. (Call it a new world order as imagined by south-of-the-border poultrymen: the banner of Guatemala is at the center, Mexico is at bottom right, and the U.S. is at bottom left.) On the table is box upon box of chicken. When I approach the birthday