between 19 and not see a Pioneer Chicken, which is officially named Pioneer Take-Out after the long-ago-razed Pioneer Market next to the original location off Sunset Boulevard.
#The nearest kentucky fried chicken near me full
The sort of thing you’d move heaven and earth to have again, knowing full well it’s not the best, just something that can take you back in time. According to my mom, who ate there all the time, this shit was the kind of bad for you that drives you crazy with desire if you had it routinely and then never again. You could get Orange Bang there, which is an Orange Julius if it had 20 percent more sugar in it. The fried chicken looked orange, it was greasy as hell, and when you bit in, there was a really loud crunch. It had the standard fast food chain look: lots of windows, small dining area, a drive-through, and a large sign depicting a chuck wagon driven by a jolly cook named Pioneer Pete. It peaked in the late 1970s, when there were hundreds of locations throughout California, many of them in the greater L.A. Pioneer Chicken, in its day, was just as significant, so why have these other places been preserved while Pioneer falls into obscurity?įounded in 1962 in Echo Park, Pioneer Chicken was one of several fried chicken chains that were once ubiquitous in L.A. It’s why there’s still a preserved first-generation McDonald’s in Downey with ol’ Speedee the Chef staring down at you, trapped in a world he no longer understands. It’s why Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake is a historical landmark. That whole bit about the car and speed-obsessed megalopolis that needed everything fast. One is in Boyle Heights and the other’s in Bell Gardens. The more important thing I learned is that there are two Pioneer Chickens left in Los Angeles, each stubbornly surviving for decades longer than all others. Indonesia is where Pioneer Chicken still soldiers on, 8,000 miles from where it started. It’s called California Fried Chicken there, and it was founded by a group of Indonesian guys who got hooked on Pioneer while in college at USC and wanted to bring it home. The first thing I learned from Googling was that Pioneer Chicken is all over the place in Indonesia - just look for the outline of Pioneer Pete’s iconic chuck wagon. Why did nobody in Los Angeles ever tell me this? Simpson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that once boasted 270 locations. Then, there was Pioneer Chicken, a homegrown fried chicken chain endorsed by O.J. There was Wimpy, a pre-World War II burger joint that no longer exists in America but thrives in South Africa. There was the last Howard Johnson’s restaurant in upstate New York, recently closed because the owner was a sexual predator. There were the McDonald’s franchises that still sold the McPizza, one in Ohio and one in West Virginia, until corporate made them stop in 2017 (took too long to cook). Three survive on Long Island and four are scattered around Ohio. There was Arthur Treacher’s, a 1970s fish and chips chain (the first in America),started by an actor from Mary Poppins. So down the rabbit hole I went, investigating the ghosts of lesser-known American fast food chains and where and whether you could still find them. But the discovery that this chain I had almost completely forgotten had a second life somewhere fascinated me. He was just entertaining a deranged fantasy about how he would piss his money away if he were rich. My cousin had no intention of going to Malaysia, of course. It is totally gone in America - the last one was in San Bernardino County and it closed in 2011- but there are tons of them in Malaysia. Kenny Rogers Roasters is a big deal in Malaysia.
There’s no way the chicken chain founded by country legend Kenny Rogers still exists, but I Googled it anyway, because sometimes my cousin tells whatever you call a not-lie. We’re going to Malaysia and I’m eating that chicken. “Because you can still go to fuckin’ Kenny Rogers Roasters there. “We’re going to Malaysia!” my cousin Brett yelled on the phone.
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