LOS ANGELES
ORDERING Los Angeles-area restaurants with Jidori chicken include Lucques, which has a paillard.
THE cuisine here is as diverse as the city itself, but there are a few things that every imaginative restaurant in town seems to share, as reliably as rain comes in spring and fires in autumn. Persimmons. Meyer lemons. Jidori chicken.
The chicken — a type of free-range bird common in Japan but until recently almost unheard of in American restaurants outside the Los Angeles area — is served with a ragout of root vegetables at Mélisse, in Santa Monica, Calif. At Hatfield’s, in Los Angeles, it’s used for the buttermilk-steamed chicken breast. It’s in the chicken liver pâté at BLT Steak LA, in West Hollywood. Culina, at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, serves it up in pollo Lucchese, slow roasted with rapini and cannellini. And it is the central fare at Kokekokko, a restaurant in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo that is dedicated to chicken worship.
It’s a hyper-local specialty item, basic but beloved for its unrivaled freshness.
“I don’t really know of any other super fresh, local, natural chicken in Los Angeles,” said Suzanne Goin, of Lucques, in Los Angeles, who serves Jidori breasts as paillard with, say, shell beans and calls it her favorite chicken. “It’s also very clean and ‘chickeny’ tasting.”
The birds are raised on a handful of farms in California, largely in the agriculturally rich Central Valley. The chickens are fed all-vegetarian diets, without antibiotics.
“You don’t just grow a chicken, you form a relationship,” said Dennis Mao, whose Los Angeles plant processes the chickens after they leave the farm. They are raised in large barns but are free to roam in their adjacent pastures, Mr. Mao explained.
But their major selling point is freshness. Local food is what’s expected in Los Angeles, and their provenance is right downtown, where they arrive at Mr. Mao’s tiny plant — one of the last food distributors in an area of the city that has converted largely to the garment trade — around 2 a.m. each day. Under the eye of a federal Agriculture Department inspector, they are slaughtered, then cleaned, almost entirely by hand, and chilled in large vats of ice water, as opposed to the chilling systems used by many larger purveyors that tend to fill the birds with so much water that they often become poultry-scented popsicles.
This step is key to the chicken’s super-fowl flavor, according to Mr. Mao. The government “allows about 10 percent water retention in chickens,” he said. “We have about 2 percent.”
They are then quickly delivered to chefs. “The odds are, that chicken was probably killed between 12 and 24 hours before I sell it,” said Victor Casanova, the chef at Culina. “It comes to me with the head on, the feet on, and it’s awesome.”
There are three varieties: the company’s biggest seller, a Cornish-cross “large” bird that is rarely more than four pounds; a leaner, gamier bird, sold largely to Asian chefs; and a tough hen, past her egg-laying prime, used largely for stock.
In the plant, charming little handmade signs scrawled on cardboard mark which vat holds which type of bird.
Over the last year or so, Mr. Mao’s Jidori chickens have begun to leave the Los Angeles area and make it to the kitchens of a handful of restaurants in other cities, like Seattle and Chicago, and even to Englewood, N.J., where the Mitsuwa Marketplace sells the chicken parts retail.
“We’ll never be that big because we can’t be,” Mr. Mao said of his plant, which processes between 5,000 and 6,000 chickens a day, a mere feather on the floor of big poultry giants like Tyson. “We are a straight line from farm to here to distributor to customers within 24 hours. I tell chefs, ‘Don’t order my product for the week, order for the next day.’ ”
Jidori, roughly translated as “from the ground” in Japanese, is a type of mixed-breed domestic free-range chicken in Japan, where eating chickens was not heard of until the end of the 19th century, said Hiroko Shimbo, a Japanese cookbook author based in New York.
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