By Josh Goldblatt
Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t get good fried chicken on the Upper West Side, at least if it’s Father’s Day.* This past weekend, Thomas Keller, better known in these parts for fancy French restaurants (Per Se), offered a fried chicken meal at Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center. Keller serves fried chicken regularly at Ad Hoc, his more informal, family-style restaurant in California, but had felt content, until Sunday, to deprive New Yorkers of his fried fowl graces.
The fried chicken feast was featured for brunch, and a line began forming an hour before Bouchon’s 11:30 a.m. opening. This reporter telephoned earlier in the week and was told calls had been coming in daily inquiring about the fried chicken. This reporter is so enamored (obsessed) with fried chicken he actually arrived before 10am to scope out the situation.
For $38 a person, a table received an asparagus salad, leek bread pudding, celeriac remoulade, cornbread, and blueberry pie with buttermilk ice cream. Oh yes, and fried chicken.
The asparagus salad (right) was served with a poached egg, prosciutto, and ricotta salata (a form of ricotta which has been salted and dried), and it was a fine way to start the meal. The leek bread pudding was studded with pieces of ham, adding a salty, porky taste which played nicely off the fresh leeks. The dish was almost creamy, bordering on mashed potato-like territory. Celeriac tasted of the whitish ends of a stalk of celery, and was a fresh and slightly bitter complement to all the savory and rich food (according that bastion of knowledge, Wikepedia, it’s a form of celery cultivated for its edible roots). The cornbread was nice though somewhat unremarkable. The biggest problem with the blueberry pie was the smallness of the serving.
Oh yes, and that fried chicken. Keller’s fried chicken cannot be categorized as “authentic” Southern fried chicken; I doubt you would have a version like this in the woods of Kentucky. What you have, rather, is unpretentious fried chicken prepared according to the specifications of a master chef. The chicken was indeed flavorful and benefitted from the lemon, garlic and herbs in which it was brined. Despite the evident quality of the chicken, it seemed it was fried well before we ordered in order to meet the demand of the occasion. Therefore, it was not as fresh as it could have been and suffered accordingly.
Still, an enjoyable experience, and no doubt, with some further acclimation, the fried chicken at Bouchon could get better. Does anyone else agree that New Yorkers deserve to be able to get a bucket of Keller’s fried chicken and then go for a picnic in Central Park?
*There are actually quite a few fried chicken options in our neighborhood, Rack and Soul and Jacob’s Pickles, to name two.
Josh Goldblatt, an Upper West Sider, also writes at foodandpants.com.
To Thomas Keller: Stick to what you do best. It obviously isn’t this.
Great review.