East Side Poultry

I fancy myself a bit of a fried chicken aficionado. I fry up my own at home on a regular basis, and I seek it out at restaurants around the city. Yes, I’m still partial to the fried chicken of the South, but I’ve found some good places here in New York City, too. So when a friend gushed over the fried chicken at East Side Poultry, I just had to get a delivery one chilly evening.

It’s nondescript deli-looking place on the Upper East Side, near a bunch of inexpensive eateries of wildly varying cuisines. It’s rather large, however, with two distinct areas. There’s a lot of cooking going on in that storefront!

I ordered online via SeamlessWeb, and decided on the fried chicken meal at $26. Why not? It’s a whole fried chicken (yes, in parts) and two large sides, for which I chose garlic roasted potatoes and macaroni and cheese. I fancy myself a bit of a mac and cheese aficionado too, or at least like to try others’ attempts in order to improve my own. After a reasonably short wait, the intercom buzzed and I was in possession of my dinner.

This is much of the whole fried chicken. Eight reasonably-sized pieces, the skin covered in a coating of flour and deep-fried. There was nothing greasy about the chicken, and it was still warm when I opened its tin.

Something was missing, though. First, it wasn’t salted, and honestly I’m not sure it was a flavored coating at all. It was just fried breading, little bits here and there melding with the egg or milk they used to help the breading stick to the bird, but overall, not humming with flavor on its own. Hopefully, East Side Poultry has a fairly good idea of how to deep-fry a bird, yes?

The garlic roasted potatoes were likewise hot, and were soft enough to yield to a fork. The scent of toasted garlic, like a good bagel, filled the room. The potatoes were otherwise perfectly ordinary, and plenty were packed into the tin for two meals. Other than the garlic, however, these were fairly bland, almost acting solely as a vehicle for the garlic flavor.

The mac and cheese was packed in the standard plastic pint-of-soup container (very unphotogenically, I might add). I was a little concerned about how a pint of mac and cheese constituted a “large” side item, but no matter, that was plenty. It wasn’t gummy pasta, but like the potatoes, it wasn’t bursting with flavor. I like a little something extra in my mac and cheese, I guess, and this didn’t deliver on that front.

Plate #1, a little of everything. I love the dark meat chicken parts, but those will be tasty even a couple days old, so I started with that demon piece, the breast. I figured if they could succeed with this huge chunk of white meat, it would bode well for the remainder of the food.

Well, it was a bit of a hit, a bit of a miss. I don’t know if this conveys how juicy that breast meat came out, but it was plenty juicy. Trouble is, well, the average chicken breast has very little flavor on its own, this one included, and I really needed the coating to provide some reason to eat this whole piece. It failed to do so.

At any rate, I went through a thigh and wing as well; I don’t judge a fried chicken place by its wings, as they’re all but useless filler pieces, but these wings had a little heft, so that was a bonus. The thigh was really quite good, and I believe a subsequent visit might entail sticking to the dark meat.

I recommend the dark-meat chicken at East Side Poultry, though you’ll probably be reaching for the salt as I did. The menu boasts an impressive array of foods from which to choose, including standard Jewish deli staples like matzo ball soup and hot pastrami sandwiches, so next time I’ll try new dishes to replace, or more likely supplement, my chicken feast. For $26, I did receive an awful lot of food, so I’d consider it worth the money. Often SeamlessWeb seems to offer East Side Poultry at a 20% discount, so keep your eyes peeled for that deal, too. It’s definitely worth a shot.