I know a lot of people who don’t consider it a meal if there isn’t meat, and don’t consider it meat if it’s chicken. “Chicken is like vegetables,” a food-loving friend from Muscat used to say with a sneer. For him, the eating didn’t begin until we started on the mutton or beef.

But chicken has its moments, and when it’s battered and fried, I’d put it up there with some of the all-time great dishes. There are so many ways in which to get your fried chicken fix, and one of the strangest combinations here in Los Angeles is fried chicken served with waffles, complete with maple syrup. The chewy waffle works well against the crunch of the chicken batter, and yes, sweet maple syrup and poultry get along surprisingly well together. (Korean fried chicken also uses sweetness, in a batter that seems to clash and shatter against your teeth.) More high-end restaurants are offering Monday night fried chicken menus, including places as rarified as Chef Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Beverly Hills. But fried chicken is labour intensive, so it can be surprisingly difficult to find in a non-fast-food setting.

And so it remains my only fast food weakness, for if it wasn’t for KFC, Popeye’s and Church’s, the only time I’d be at a global or national chain would be on a road trip when there was absolutely no other choice.

But I’m no “bone-in” snob—I’m equally drawn by chicken strips and nuggets or “popcorn”. My favourite of these is a dish called “night market chicken” available at Taiwanese bubble tea shops. Cubes of dark meat are deep-fried in a crispy, garlicky batter and then tossed with deep-fried basil leaves and spice powder. What really makes this dish in my mind, is the choice to use dark meat: It’s interesting that at Chinese or Taiwanese restaurants, dark meat commands a price premium, but at American restaurants, it’s white meat that you pay more for. However, this obsession with stringy, boring breast meat, is balanced by that other very American dish — deep-fried chicken wings. The iconic version of course is the one from that bar in Buffalo, New York, said to be the first place that thought to toss deep-fried wings with a mix of butter and hot sauce.

Fried to order

For me though, the best flavour for wings is lemon pepper. A great version is by a chain restaurant called Wing Stop, that takes about 20 minutes to serve since the wings are fried to order. It’s the only restaurant for which I have an app on my phone. Their wings are crispy and salty and, yes, oily, and the downside with eating in company is that the bones on the plate are proof of greed. (Unless you do what I do and move half of them to your wife’s plate when she’s not looking.)

But perhaps my favourite fried chicken is the red version called ‘chicken kebab’, served at certain Bengaluru restaurants. The chicken comes hacked into half pieces, and goes rather wonderfully with ghee rice. The restaurants had limited vegetarian selections, and I’m often amused to remember how we’d often have one hapless vegetarian among us, totally forgotten until she’d plaintively ask the waiter for “paneer (cottage cheese) or something”. It was always a she, and teenage boys forgetting about a girl when planning lunch shows just how food-focussed my gang was. Now excuse me while I get rid of the evidence — finding a quiet place to dump the chicken bones before starting on round three was it? Four? Who cares, it’s fried chicken!

Gautam Raja is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles, USA.