The Other Critics

C. Thi Nguyen Finds Epiphany at Hawthorne’s House of Chicken

“Trust the chicken” Photo: House of Chicken

L.A.’s major league restaurant critics are each taking the week off, flitting around Italy, drinking their respective reds and eating in the out-of-the-way little epics they keep secretly stashed in their caps (or so we prefer to picture them). Their absence gives us the chance to revel in The L.A. Times’ indomitable substitute hitter, C. Thi Nguyen. Good eating and deep revelations are found at Hawthorne’s Lilliputian kebab joint, House of Chicken, “the place for a chicken epiphany.” The restaurant “makes you realize how cheap and tawdry so many of your earlier garlic chicken flings were…it might make you realize that a lot of those other popular garlic chicken joints are built on the Taco Bell model of cookery,” the writer swipes from a newly rocked world, drawing our own awkward gaze to the stretched Zankou chain. Nguyen suggests “Trust the chicken” as the motto here, crowning a new king in our Armenian kebab, garlic, and shawarma scene. [LAT]

C. Thi Nguyen Finds Epiphany at Hawthorne’s House of Chicken