Clucky Break

Cold fried chicken for breakfast? Although I’m not usually one who cares enough about leftovers to take them home, after my first visit to the new K. T. Fryers in Waldo it seemed criminal not to pack up the giant chicken breast and the sugar-glazed cinnamon roll I hadn’t been able to finish. The roll survived only until 3 a.m., when, suffering a headache, I found myself semicomatose in the kitchen, hunting for an aspirin. I discovered the pastry instead. It worked faster than Excedrin.

Later that morning, I stumbled groggily into the kitchen and opened my refrigerator to find the chicken breast. I pounced on it as soon as I’d turned on the radio for the morning news — before I’d even filled the grinder with coffee beans. I stood there in my pajamas, eating the breast in the middle of the kitchen floor while my cats stared at me enviously. Like cold pizza, cold fried chicken has its own distinctive charm as a breakfast dish. For one thing, it still has some visual appeal (unlike most restaurant leftovers, which congeal or grow soggy overnight in the fridge) and a pleasing, sensuous texture.

There’s history in that cold bird, too. In the Edna Lewis Cookbook, the Virginia-born writer notes that until the 1920s, fried chicken was traditionally a late-spring or early-summer dish because young birds were less stringy and more flavorful than older ones. That’s why so many restaurant menus of the 1940s and ’50s listed their pan-fried specialty as “spring chicken” — until the term became generic, like “Southern fried chicken” or “Kentucky fried chicken.” Chickens were all fried in pans until 1939, when a struggling motor-court owner named Harland Sanders tinkered with his own pressure-cooker recipe, which later became the basis for the KFC empire. And, Lewis writes, fried chicken was once a popular breakfast dish in the South.

It still has its devotees, who flock to famous joints like Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘N Waffles in Los Angeles or Roy Henry’s in Austin, Texas; Kansas City once had, at 70th and Troost, Marc’s Chicken ‘N Waffles. The combination seems absurd, but it was a perfect blend of beloved childhood tastes — call it culinary fowl play. These days, however, I eat fried chicken for breakfast only if it came home with me from some terrific chicken place the night before.

And I’m happy to say that the second location for the Lenexa-based K. T. Fryers, which has opened in half of the old Michael Forbes Grill in the Waldo Mart shopping center, does chicken proud, with a crackling, golden crust delicately seasoned with black, red and white pepper and a touch of garlic. This may be heresy, but at K. T. Fryers the chickens are pan-fried in aluminum, not iron skillets. Owner Kurtis Lam has a reason for that. “There’s an art form to using cast-iron skillets that not every cook can master,” he says. “Aluminum pans aren’t as heavy and unwieldy, but the chicken cooks perfectly.”

Lam knows how to play chicken. He started his restaurant career at age seventeen, working at the old Granny’s restaurant downtown (see Mouthing Off, page 40). Granny’s used the recipe created by the legendary “Chicken” Betty Lucas. Several restaurants around the city still use variations on her formula, though K. T. Fryers (the name combines K for Kurtis with T for the name of Lam’s former business partner), uses a different recipe. But the chicken soup is exactly the same as Granny’s. “It should be,” says Lam. “I’ve been making it for 22 years.”

And it’s a comforting soup, rich with thick egg noodles, carrots, celery and big chunks of tender chicken breast in a soothing broth. K. T.’s dinners include either a cup of this soup or a disastrous salad. (The lettuce is so soggy that the dressing devolves into a messy puddle that the shredded carrots, chopped cabbage, sliced onion and grated cheese can’t enliven.) After this course, things pick up dramatically.

Out come big plates of chicken — fried, barbecued, charbroiled (doused with lemon-garlic marinade or a sticky teriyaki sauce) or Italian-style (topped with sausage, tomato sauce and melted mozzarella). People who don’t want poultry can order deep-fried catfish, a charbroiled Kansas City strip or a bulked-up pork chop (either pan-fried, charbroiled or grilled with Cajun spices).

On two of my three visits, I ventured away from the fried chicken and sampled the boneless fried catfish fillet, which turned out to be flavorless underneath its light crust. Only slightly better was the broiled teriyaki chicken, artfully sporting a pineapple ring, a neon-red maraschino cherry and hot grill marks on the breast’s slightly caramelized exterior. Both of those nights I wistfully watched my friends eat the restaurant’s signature dish, by far the best thing on the menu: fried chicken.

“Why would you eat anything else at a restaurant called K. T. Fryers?” asked my friend Bob as he spooned a big heap of mashed potatoes onto his plate. “It’s like going to Winstead’s and ordering egg rolls. You just don’t do it.”

There’s a logic in that. Fried chicken is the main reason this place attracts a crowd (elderly folks in the early evening, an eclectic mix of people — straight, gay, Gen X and neighborhood baby boomers — later) that happily waits for those platters of made-to-order bird.

When I finally ordered the fried chicken myself, I was so happy with the whole damn meal that I didn’t complain about having to sit in the smoking section. Because there are only eight tables in the official nonsmoking area, just getting a booth was lucky. Lam has configured the bulk of the tables in his half of the old Michael Forbes space (H&R Block took the other half) around the large bar, making it difficult to segregate the smokers. But the restaurant is surprisingly well-ventilated, so only the rabid antitobacco contingent should be annoyed sitting up front. The chicken breasts, warm rolls slathered with honey butter, fresh-tasting green beans cooked with bacon and creamy potatoes drenched in a sultry gravy can taste good anywhere in the place. And the cinnamon roll was vastly better than Stroud’s.

The portions are as big as a barn, so plan on requesting a carry-out box. Especially if you want to end the meal on a sweet note, as I did, with a hefty bowl of peach cobbler. Steaming in their pastry crust, mildly-spiced peach slices gleamed like cut topaz under a lavish scoop of French vanilla ice cream. The cobbler was gorgeous, but nearly anticlimactic after the heavy meal. Four or five bites later, I had to push the bowl away or plan on curling up in the booth for the rest of the night.

I walked out clutching my box of leftovers, secure in the knowledge that a piece of cold chicken is always a pleasure to discover first thing in the morning.