Fried Chicken

by John T. Edge

  In 1964, Leslie’s aunt Helen moved her lunchroom to new quarters on North Robertson Street, adding an e to her name for a touch of class and dubbing the little café Chez Helene. Her nephew followed. “I brought in the dishes I learned at Holmes,” recalls Leslie. “It was kind of like integration: a little bit of theirs, a little bit of ours. My aunt already had the greens and yas and jambalaya.” When Pollock retired in 1975, Leslie bought her out. In time, all of New Orleans was abuzz with tales of the little neighborhood restaurant where they served tin pie plates of broiled oysters in a velveteen Rockefeller sauce and chipped white platters piled high with the best fried chicken known to man.

  At a time when America was awakening to the possibilities of marketing regional cuisine, Leslie was a hot property. By the mid-’80s, rumor had it that he was on the verge of becoming the black Creole analogue to white Cajun Paul Prud-homme. It helped that Leslie—his smiling face framed by a swooping pair of muttonchops, a diamond-encrusted crab pendant around his neck—knew he was selling more than fried chicken. “Yeah, I could talk,” he says. “When folks wanted to talk about New Orleans food, I was the man. Difference was, I could cook too, and a lot of those other people couldn’t. I could back up my arrogance.”

  Business partnership offers poured in. Plans were drawn up for a chain of fried chicken restaurants. Upscale branch locations of Chez Helene opened, first in the French Quarter, later in Chicago, Illinois. “Seems like every other day somebody was wanting to talk with me about some kind of great deal,” recalls Leslie. “Seems like everybody wanted to use my name to sell this, my face to sell that. I made the mistake of listening.”

  In March of 1987, Hollywood came calling, in the form of actor Tim Reid, who had previously played the character Venus Flytrap on the show WKRP in Cincinnati. Producer Hugh Wilson and he stopped in for dinner, and when they left a few hours later, they were convinced that they had found the restaurant around which they could build a hit television show. The story line was this: Upon the death of his estranged father, Frank Parish, a black professor of Italian Renaissance history in Boston, inherits the family business, a corner bar and restaurant in New Orleans called Chez Louisiane, thus prompting a rediscovery of his own cultural and culinary heritage.

  Leslie signed on as a consultant, traveling to California to supervise construction of the kitchen set. He also acted as an informal adviser, coaching the writers and actors on the vagaries of New Orleans diet and dialect. Under Leslie’s tutelage, Tony Burton, who played Big Arthur McCormick, the head cook at the fictional Chez Louisiane, and Tim Reid, who played the part of Parish, came to understand mirlitons and muffulettas, Cajuns and Creoles.

  Frank’s Place debuted in September of 1987. Though it was a critical success, garnering an Emmy award for Wilson and winning a loyal cadre of fans, CBS canceled it exactly a year later. Some network suits cited gritty themes and low ratings, others a budget that made Frank’s Place the most expensive thirty minutes on television. Wilson himself admitted that the series might have offered viewers a slice of life that was too insular, too peculiar for prime time. When programmers pulled the plug, writers were finishing work on an episode starring Sammy Davis, Jr., as a Mardi Gras Indian. Incidentally, there remains no record of what tribe Davis would have belonged to, though speculation among locals was high that he would wear the headdress and feather plume of either the Wild Tchoupitoulas or Yellow Pocahontas.

  the klieg lights of fame dimmed. Leslie pulled the local television ads he had been running, the ones that touted his restaurant as “the inspiration for the hit television series Frank’s Place.” Business at the original Chez Helene stalled. One by one, the branch locations and fried chicken franchises closed.

  Already a veteran of more than twenty-five years at the stove, Leslie shrugs off his fall from grace as if it were an Ash Wednesday hangover. “I knew I could ride it out, that it all would pass,” he tells me. “I was still cooking, still had my little restaurant. The real problem was that I was sitting on dynamite. The dope fiends and pushers were moving into the neighborhood. Now don’t get me wrong, I know the streets. I’ve lived my whole life around pimps and whores. They’ve got a job to do same as me. But this was something different.”

  In August of 1989, Leslie declared bankruptcy. Sales taxes were way past due. Partners with fat bankrolls and unlimited lines of credit were long gone. In 1994 the doors closed for good, and soon thereafter the corner building that once housed the hottest restaurant in New Orleans burned down. A bulldozer razed the smoke-stained yellow brick walls; three decades of sweat and toil and garlic-perfumed grease collapsed in a cloud of dust.

  and then, like Alice down the rabbit hole, Austin Leslie was gone. Vanished from sight. He popped up now and again, cooking at the Basin Street Club one month, over at the Bottom Line the next. Somewhere along the way, he even manned the fryer at a restaurant called N’awlins just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. (Like a bluegrass picker in Japan, Leslie’s ego and his pocketbook required remove from the origins of his fame.) “We had a good thing going there for a while,” Leslie tells me. “They loved my gumbo. On the other hand, there’s nothing like cooking Creole food in New Orleans. That’s your toughest audience, your best one.”

  In the years since, Leslie has never really made another kitchen his own—until he answered a want ad in the New Orleans newspaper in 1996. “I think it said something like, ‘Looking for a Creole/Cajun cook,’” recalls Jacques Leonardi, the elfin restauranteur who owns Jacques-Imo’s. “I never thought I could get Austin to cook in a funky joint like this, but he was willing.” The two men make for an odd couple: Leonardi, the joker, always ready with a drink and a slap on the back for his patrons. And Leslie, the onetime toast of New Orleans, the golden boy apparent of Creole cuisine, standing tall by the deep fryer, spearing chicken thighs from the roiling grease with an oversized carving fork.

  Leslie once lorded over three restaurants and a chain of fried chicken shops. Advertising agencies plastered his smiling face on the side of New Orleans buses. Entrepreneurs heralded his story as worthy of emulation. Those days are long gone, but Leslie seems happy at Jacques-Imo’s.

  Since he signed on with Leonardi, Leslie has commandeered the back left corner of the kitchen. He is not the executive chef. Or the sous chef. He’s the fry cook. Anything that emerges from the Keating deep fryer is his charge. Fried chicken is still his focus—and it’s as garlicky good as it ever was—but Leslie now turns out some of Leonardi’s more whacked creations. He’s the muscle behind appetizers like deep-fried roast beef po’ boys, not to mention high-wire-act entrées like Godzilla Meets Fried Green Tomato, wherein a deep-fried soft-shell crab plays the part of the monster.

  Neither Leonardi’s penchant for taking outsized liberties with Creole cookery, nor the swamp hut motif of Jacques-Imo’s—acid sunsets airbrushed on the walls, voodoo candles on the tables, plastic alligators screwed to weathered window frames—give Leslie pause. Nowadays, he focuses his attention upon the task at hand, upon what’s burbling in his deep fryer. But every couple of weeks, a reporter or savvy eater seeks him out, bent upon learning the secret of his fried chicken. Many are enticed by rumors that Leslie dips the chicken in a batter made with a brand of condensed milk that is available only in Orleans Parish. When a pilgrim presents himself and asks the question, though, Leslie just holds out his flour-covered hands for inspection, palms down then palms up. “The secret’s in here,” he tells them. “The secret’s in here.”

  Creole Fried Chicken with New Orleans Confetti

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  This recipe owes its inspiration to Austin Leslie. Since he began frying chicken in the 1960s, admirers have argued over how to replicate his mastery of poultry. Unlike Willie Mae Seaton of Willie Mae’s Scotch House in New Orleans, he is a devotee of deep-frying. As for Leslie’s chosen ingredients, I’ve heard at least a dozen wild guesses, including a marinade of clam juice. Austin Leslie is part of the problem, since over the years h
e has given his name to a number of variations. I’ve tried to synthesize the best of the bunch. Though I did not embrace clam juice as a possibility, I did find that condensed milk gave the chicken a pleasant richness.

  ■ 1 chicken weighing 3 to 4 pounds (the

  smaller, the better), cut into 8-10 pieces

  ■ 2 tablespoons salt

  ■ 2 tablespoons black pepper

  ■ 2 tablespoons Cajun seasoning (I like Tony

  Chachere’s.)

  ■ 1 egg, beaten

  (continued)

  ■ 1 can (12 ounces) unsweetened

  condensed milk

  ■ 1 cup water

  ■ Peanut oil

  ■ 1 cup all-purpose flour

  ■ 10 slices dill pickle

  ■ 1 garlic clove, chopped very fine

  ■ 1 bunch parsley, chopped fine

  Sprinkle salt, pepper, and Cajun seasoning over chicken and refrigerate at least 1 hour, as many as 24. Mix egg, condensed milk, and water in a bowl. Pour oil into pot to a depth of at least 3 inches and heat to 375°. Dip chicken pieces into egg wash, then dredge in flour. Shake off excess flour and slip chicken into hot oil, starting with the dark meat. Cook, maintaining a temperature of between 325° and 350°, for 12 minutes, or until an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white meat. Drain on a wire rack for 10 minutes, and garnish each piece with a pickle slice and confetti of garlic and parsley. Serves 4.

  Coop d’Etat

  when we tell the story of our country, we tend to focus on the big names, the men and women whom historians and the popular press have decreed proxies for the whole unseemly lot of us. Who won the Civil War? Abraham Lincoln. To whom do we owe the fruits of the civil rights movement? Martin Luther King, Jr.

  The same applies to many of our totemic foods. We often tell the story of hamburgers by way of Ray Kroc and McDonald’s, the story of hot dogs by way of a Coney Island man named Nathan. I need not remind you what name we invoke when we talk of fried chicken.

  But there are a thousand other stories out there worth telling: tales of cooks who fed the civil rights movement, who fed both Confederate and Union combatants during the Civil War, who, over the course of a career, did nothing more (and nothing less) than feed their patrons skillet after skillet of peerless fried chicken. Despite his brush with fame, Austin Leslie is one of those people. And so was Lyndell Burton of Atlanta, whose story follows.

  NINE

  Deacon Burton and His Atlanta Flock

  the Deacon received his public while stationed at the end of the serving line, in front of the cash register. A rack of Rolaids to his right, trays of plastic cutlery to his left. And always, within arm’s reach, a small brass bell, which, when Lyndell Burton required your attention, he shook with all the authority a two-inch clapper could muster.

  That bell figures large in many a recollection of Deacon Burton, for it was his custom to ring it upon learning that a dignitary—or, better yet, a first-time visitor—was among the lunchtime throng at Burton’s Grill. I remember my first visit. (Looking back, I now recognize it as my first pilgrimage in search of fried chicken.) The year was 1986, and I was new to Atlanta, newer still to Inman Park, the Deacon’s corner of the city. “See this boy with the old knock-knees,” he called out to me over the din. “ We’re gonna feed him some black-eyed peas.”

  I ate fried chicken that first day, the glories of which I had, by then, been hearing about for a good ten years. I had read about it in Knife and Fork, a monthly restaurant-review letter. I had seen television news reports of the Deacon’s trip to Washington, D.C., to fry chicken for Congressman John Lewis. I had perused the local press tributes, wherein the writer usually managed to point out that, while Harlan Sanders was merely an honorary colonel (more than 170,000 fellow Kentuckians share the title), Lyndell Burton was an actual deacon in the Free for All Baptist Church of Decatur, Georgia. And though I can’t be sure of my exact order that summer day, I imagine my lunch included a thigh and two legs, rice and gravy, black-eyed peas, and hoecakes. It became my usual, for over the next seven years, until Lyndell Burton passed away at the age of eighty-three, I was a regular.

  The Deacon served chicken of a certain size. Ralph McGill, longtime editor of The Atlanta Constitution, described such diminutive birds as “barnyard subdebs, rarely more than ten to twelve weeks old and weighing from a pound and a half to two pounds.” For me, the size of his chicken was appealing because I could order three pieces without being branded a glutton.

  And, like the ladies of the Chalfonte Hotel, the Deacon served chicken of a certain softness. Though he floured his chicken and fried it in cast-iron skillets popping with grease, he did not serve birds plastered in a crust that, after two bites, fissured and fell away. His was an elastic, somehow crisp envelope that tasted of nothing more exotic than salt and pepper.

  Cynics might successfully argue that other Atlantans were equally adept chicken fryers. Annie Keith, who once operated a house restaurant nearby, has her adherents. And so does Thelma Grundy of Thelma’s Kitchen over near Georgia Tech. A troubling few might even look to Lester Maddox, onetime owner of the Pickrick Cafeteria, who rose to the highest office in the state by leveraging his Jim Crow-era refusal to serve fried chicken to African Americans. But Deacon Burton never claimed to serve the best in Atlanta—that title was thrust upon him. Ask him how he prepared his chicken and he’d reply, “Wash ’em, put ’em in some flour, season ’em with salt and pepper and some grease. That’s all.”

  He was a quiet man with a thin and deeply furrowed face, a wiry body, and a smile that somehow let you know he had weathered his share of adversity. Aside from his bell-clanging habit, his only sign of ego was broadcast by his taste in hats: In his later years, the Deacon wore a high fluted chef’s toque, which, when lunch service was at full tilt and the kitchen was smogged with grease, shone above the haze like a beacon. It took me a good year of sixty-second conversations at the cash register to coax forth a semblance of his life story, but I realized when I began researching this book that I still did not know nearly enough.

  That’s what brings me back to the Deacon’s old corner today, when I take a seat at Son’s Place, Lenn Storey’s faithful rendering of his father’s grill, I know that the boy who would become Deacon Burton was born in the town of Watkinsville, northeast of Atlanta. I know that, on a Christmas Eve when he was just fourteen, Burton ran away from home. I know that by Christmas Day he found work as a dishwasher at Faust, a Greek restaurant in downtown Atlanta.

  Burton rose from dishwasher to cook, working at some of the best Atlanta dining rooms of the day, including those of the Henry Grady Hotel and the Capital City Club. And I know that Burton cooked in the Navy during World War II, feeding three meals a day to 4,000 men. He opened Burton’s Grill after returning home from the war, and in the early years moved it from a highway north of town to Inman Park.

  Lenn Storey and I talk over his father’s and his own cooking career. Growing up, Storey did not know Burton was his father, but he was already following in his footsteps, first, during high school, pressure-frying chicken in a Kentucky Fried Chicken-licensed cafeteria, and later, when he cooked communal meals for his fellow Atlanta firemen. We talk of the time just after his father’s death when Storey fought a bitter and ultimately unsuccessful court battle to legally establish his lineage. And we talk of the first time that the Deacon rang the brass bell and announced to all in attendance, “I want y’all to meet my boy, my son, Lenn Storey.”

  as we talk, I gnaw on a plate of Lenn Storey’s chicken. It tastes like I remember his father’s chicken tasting. Nothing fancy here, just salt and pepper and schmaltz. (That’s schmaltz as originally employed in the Yiddish language, meaning not maudlin sentimentality, but chicken fat.) And the restaurant, which sits cheek-to-jowl with his father’s old corner storefront (now converted to an Italian trattoria), is a dead ringer for Burton’s Grill. As I eat, I grow sentimental. Even the serving line, outfitted with tho
se light green melamine lunch trays, conjures his father’s spirit. But what Storey may never conjure is the spirit of the times in which Deacon Burton came to be a revered cook, a beloved Atlantan. And in many ways, he would not want to.

  When many whites first discovered Burton’s Grill in the 1970s, fried chicken was considered a relic of days gone by, back before the civil rights movement, maybe even before the Civil War. At Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, a restaurant out in the suburb of Smyrna, fried chicken was presented as the ultimate plantation dish, a savory of step-and-fetch-it allure served to locals and tourists alike amidst the retrograde splendor of a retrofitted slave lodging. Downtown, at Pittypat’s Porch (named for a character in Gone With the Wind), the trappings were more tasteful, but the underlying message was no less offensive.

  Burton’s Grill was different. Black Atlantans had long doted on Paschal’s Restaurant, on what was then called Hunter Street, taking pride in the fact that some of the seminal events in the civil rights movement, including the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, were planned over platters of their fried chicken. But for many whites that proud history proved intimidating.

  In time—no one seems to know how or why—everyone seems to have made their way over to Burton’s Grill. It may well have been the first Atlanta restaurant where the food and the setting inspired blacks and whites to recognize their common humanity across a table set with fried chicken and black-eyed peas and cornbread. Though it was black-owned, it somehow came to be considered comparatively neutral ground. Many locals remember Burton’s Grill as one of the first places where they saw blacks and whites interacting without nervous pomp or pretense. And all—black and white—remember the first time they visited, the first time a kindly gentleman rang a small brass bell and, above the report of the clapper, shouted out a welcome.