JIDORI...Chicken.
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Awaodori 阿波尾鶏 chicken
free-range jidori fowl
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In Los Angeles, Jidori Chicken Is the New Kid in the Coop
Axel Koester for The New York Times
Dennis Mao sells Jidori chickens to several restaurants in
the Los Angeles area, where they often are served within 24 hours
of slaughter. “You don’t just grow a chicken, you form a
relationship,” Mr. Mao said.
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By JENNIFER
STEINHAUER
Published: April 20, 2010
LOS ANGELES
Related
Recipe: Chicken Paillard With Parmesan Bread Crumbs,
Escarole, Capers and Rosemary(April 21, 2010)
Recipe: Roast Chicken With Root Vegetables and
Verjus Beurre Blanc (April 21, 2010)
Enlarge This Image
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
ORDERING Los
Angeles-area restaurants with Jidori chicken include Lucques, which
has a paillard.
Enlarge This Image
Axel Koester for The New York Times
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.
These chickens are sometimes named and distinguished by their
region, Ms. Shimbo said. “It’s like Kobe beef,” she said. “People
here may like to put the name on it, but strictly it is not Jidori
if it is from America. Here nobody complains, but people in Japan
would say, ‘That’s outrageous.’ ”
Mr. Mao began selling Jidori-style chickens in 1995, thinking
that chefs would be eager to have organic free-range birds
delivered within a day of slaughter.
“I just knew this was something important,” he said. “Chicken
was always a cheap protein, but we decided to give them the respect
they deserve.”
Mr. Mao went into his family’s business — a small food
distribution company here — in the 1980s when his father fell
ill.
“Suddenly, life makes its own decisions,” he said. They sold all
sorts of meats and proteins. “And the next thing you know,” he
said, “I became the chicken guy.”
Disillusioned with commercially raised chickens, Mr. Mao
believed that the Japanese system was the best option, he said. As
a Chinese-American, he was well versed in the Asian distaste for
fat, flavorless, industrially raised chickens and the preference
for leaner, fresher birds. He began his own company to sell such
birds. At first, Japanese chefs, knowing all about Jidori from
home, were his only customers. “In the beginning it was like
selling ice to Eskimos,” he said.
He spent the better part of the 1990s driving around with a
cooler of chickens in his S.U.V., cold-calling restaurants, trying
to persuade them to pay more than a dollar a pound extra than chefs
were used to paying for chicken, at a time before it was common to
pay a premium for better ingredients.
Wolfgang
Puck was an early adopter. Once Mr. Mao got his foot in
the door with a few major chefs, their sous chefs spread the word
of the product as they moved into their own places.
“When I was at Beverly Wilshire, everyone said you have to go
with Jidori,” said Brian Moyers, of BLT Steak.
Things grew slowly from there, with Mr. Mao’s brother, Eric,
brought on as the business manager and about a half-dozen
distributors brought in to replace his S.U.V. In recent years he
has also trademarked the name, because just as fake white truffles
and imitation caviar are facts of life in the restaurant business,
so apparently is counterfeit poultry.
Dennis and Eric Mao’s Jidori chicken has such cachet in Los
Angeles that even chefs who don’t have any sometimes claim it on
their menus, the brothers said.
“It’s not something we ever thought would happen,” Eric Mao
said. “But we hear about it from time to time from our
distributors. We worry about it. We don’t want someone selling a
bad product and calling it ours.”
Having a chicken-processing plant in the middle of the Los
Angeles garment district can pose problems, though. An errant bird
has been known to bust out and make its way down a busy street,
careering toward a fabric spool.
The brothers’ passion for elevating chicken continues. In late
2008, Dennis Mao branched out, opening Robata-Ya, a restaurant in a
Japanese-American area of West Los Angeles, where he serves up
chicken skewers, raw chicken-liver sashimi (“That is a hard-core
Japanese dish that pretty much only Japanese customers will get,”
he said), braised coxcombs and grilled chicken hearts with the
aortas still attached.
“It’s like our little chicken lab,” he said. “We just want to
try and see all the different things we can do with a chicken.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: May 5,
2010
An article on April 21 about Jidori chicken, a brand of poultry
that has become popular with chefs in Los Angeles, referred
incorrectly to the education of the company’s owner, Dennis Mao. He
did not graduate from the law school at the University of
California, Berkeley.