Philly's fired up over fried chicken

AT FEDERAL Donuts on 2nd and Manton, they start selling chicken at 11:45 a.m., after the morning hordes have wiped them out of hot doughnuts. A bearded dude stands at the door and hands you a yellow Post-it note with a handwritten number on it. If you order a half chicken, he rips the sticky note in half. When I arrived at 11:51 on Monday morning, I was given a ripped Post-it with the number 21 scrawled in orange marker.

"We start giving away numbers at 11:45, and we're usually out by 12:30," I overheard food writer and Federal Donuts partner Felicia D'Ambrosio tell some customers at the counter. A woman tried to buy two chickens and she was told no - this was in clear violation of the one-chicken-per-customer rule. "We haven't let anyone else do that," said D'Ambrosio, "so it's only fair."

It was all very civilized, and no one seemed put out. I patiently waited about 20 minutes for my number to be called and then another 20 minutes for my takeout fried chicken - in this case, with tangy honey ginger glaze. It was so good that I scarfed down all four pieces in my car before driving back to my office in University City.

"You went all the way down to Pennsport and waited 40 minutes for takeout fried chicken?" said a friend when I returned. "Are you effing insane?"

My first thought: This is why I didn't bring you any. Second thought: If I'm insane, there are a lot of insane people walking the streets these days. We seem to be part of a quasi-cult, seekers of the city's finest fried chicken.

Not the Colonel's

The fried-chicken trend, which hit Philadelphia a little late and emerged slowly over the past two years, has clearly entered its baroque phase, and the chicken cognoscenti now look beyond the classic southern-fried version.

That's not to say that great old-school fried chicken doesn't exist. Check out a mainstay like Ms. Tootsie's RBL on South Street, or newcomer Roost, which opened in West Philly last spring, or David Katz's wonderful Thursday lunch special at Meme near Rittenhouse Square: chicken, biscuit and Miller High Life for $11.

However, the fowl of the moment, the bird that's become the foodie darling, is that other KFC - Korean fried chicken. And if Korean chicken has become the height of trendiness, then it's very possible that the most influential place in the city might be Café Soho on Cheltenham Avenue in East Oak Lane.