Zug Chicken Review

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(Full link with pictures here)

Did you know that Barberton, Ohio is considered the fried chicken capital of America?

This was news to me as well, but I read it in a travel magazine, so it must be true. Barberton fried chicken, the Delta airline magazine said, is unlike any other chicken in the world: crispy outside, moist inside, with a uniform golden color that makes KFC look like Kentucky Fried Crap.

To find out if this chicken really was the chizznit, I invited a group of friends to visit Barberton on a secret taste-testing mission. Posing as undercover restaurant reviewers, we visited three restaurants that served classic Barberton-style bird, and here's what happened.

First we visited Belgrade Gardens, the original Barberton chicken joint, established in 1933. For some reason, they gave us a private room, which was fine; this let us conduct our taste test in secrecy. It also let us down several pitchers of beer in privacy, away from the prying eyes of the local press, who would kill to get their hands on our gourmet reviews.

We opened the menu, where we found a selection of chicken options, including the "chicken basket," which comes with a wing, breast, thigh, and back. "I recommend trying the back," said Evan, a Barberton chicken aficionado. "It's delicious, except when you find a kidney or lung trapped in the back meat."

Unfortunately, we found the wine selection at Belgrade Gardens left something to be desired, as the menu had just one varietal: WINE.

Red or white? Who cares?

You could also buy generic BEER, which was served by the carafe. Clearly, this place was fancy.

Our waitress arrived, and we ordered a couple of chicken baskets. "What makes your chicken so great?" Craig asked. We knew that asking the question risked the secrecy of our mission, but it was important to find out.

"There's no chicken like this anywhere in the world," our waitress said, telling us of people from Florida who have Belgrade Chicken shipped to them overnight. We grilled her about the logistics of stuffing a greasy chicken wing into a FedEx envelope, then loudly demanded she fetch us many more carafes of beer.

I stumbled to the bathroom, because I had to take a leak and get some air. My clothes, for some reason, were uncomfortably hot. I groaned loudly as I hosed down the porcelain, which may have made some of the patrons uncomfortable, because everyone was staring at me as I came out. Some people are intimidated by the powerful-smelling urine of professional food critics, I guess.

When I came back and sat down next to Jay, our meal had arrived. We tore into it like the Olsen twins on a bulimia binge. The skin was just perfectly browned, a small meaty football, and the flesh inside was uniformly fibrous and tender, like the muscle tissue of an infant. The chicken oozed a sputum of fat and juice that coated the tongue in a scrumptious goo.

I'll be honest: it was really good fried chicken.

The back of the chicken, however, was not quite so well-received. A bony slab of darkened flesh, the only one who enjoyed the back was Evan, who is clinically insane. "I've seen more meat on a Sea Monkey," Jay said as he watched Evan nibble around the vertebrae.

More beer. Jay stuffed an entire chicken breast in his mouth, releasing a pocket of hot oil which burst on his face and shirt. This made everyone laugh so hard that Kirk knocked over a carafe of beer. In the haste to mop up the spill, someone knocked the carafe onto the ground, which shattered.

Things were getting boisterous, and the table was decimated. It looked like an Islamic suicide bomber had strapped himself to Colonel Sanders. We threw some money on the table and staggered out of there like a bunch of chickens with our heads cut off.

Overall, Belgrade Gardens received a 9 out of 10. And now our team of top-secret reviewers was off to Barberton restaurant #2. Stay tuned.

(Part 2: here)
(Part 3: here)

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[killa]

A bit like my Macdonalds review on my blog...
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