Delicious Spree LA to Z: H is for Honey's Kettle Fried Chicken

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LAist is going on a delicious spree from A to Z, and it's been a while, we almost forgot where we left off. This week, we are on H as we wait. Wait. Wait for a lunch of fried chicken at Honey's Kettle Fried Chicken in Culver City.

12:45-ish.
Honey’s Kettle Fried Chicken is just a few blocks from the office on Washington Boulevard in the new renaissance area of Culver City’s downtown. We left our office a bit later just to let the usual lunch surge at area restaurants subside, then walked there.

Just before 1:00-ish.
It didn’t require much will power to avoid diet-death Honey’s Kettle for as long as we did. Honey’s Kettle was one of many in a strange stream of restaurant fires last spring. There’s a cute display in the show window out front with home-y things like a rocking chair and a board game. If you wanted to really feel like you were eating down-home cooking, you could look at the window, but you’d still have to use your imagination. It's just a window. We walked through the door, under the copper sign with a fat copper kettle.

1:03 pm
Inside, Honey's Kettle is clean and bright. The tables, chairs, and the few booths along one side are simple to the point of ikea. It feels like a green and yellow version of In-n-Out Burger. We stood back to review the menu that's posted on the wall to the right of the counter, letting "regulars" who know what they want for lunch before they even get up from their desk go ahead of us and order.

The menu is exactly like any other fried chicken restaurant - meal deals that come with a number of pieces and sides, party packs, and chicken and fish combinations. Everything from a single chicken wing to any of the half dozen sides can be ordered a la carte, even a jalapeno pepper, which costs twenty cents.

We stepped up to the register and ordered. Behind the counter, they really were deep frying foods in small batches in "kettles." It's not a gimmick. Well, color us pink for letting our LA-ness get the better of us. The Porterhouse Combo and drink was almost $10. Sure it's fish, but for that kind of cash at a counter, it better not be Long John Silver's.

The menu asks to allow 15 minutes for catfish, so we stepped outside to reserve a seat on the patio. When we had arrived, about half the tables inside were taken, half the tables outside were taken, and by the time we finished ordering, there were several people waiting in line behind us. Honey's Kettle is popular for lunch. It's not bursting at the seams, but the register is always ringing. We waited to hear the names called over the loudspeaker. Our name was on the receipt and the timestamp said 1:03 pm.

1:20 pm.
Tick tick tick. We thought we heard our name, so we went inside with the receipt to pick up our trays. We were mistaken. They had called out Sharla or Sandy or something, but not Sarah. Perhaps we were a little lightheaded because we hadn't eaten breakfast that morning. Oh well, it had barely turned fifteen minutes since we ordered, and we're not that obsessive.

1:25 pm
Have you noticed that about 15 people have gone inside and back out in the last five minutes?

1:31 pm
It has been 28 minutes and they hadn't called our name. We went inside, a little more than curious about who they sent up the river to catch the damned catfish. The food was not ready. We went back outside. Our arms were strangely beginning to look like drumsticks.

1:41 pm
Fah-eee-nuh-lee, we sat down with our trays. We had waited thirty eight minutes - that's almost three times the "allow 15" for katfish. We looked at the deeply golden fried chicken, the mix of steak-cut and regular French fries, and the dimpled buttermilk honey biscuit. This better taste like sex.

It didn't taste like sex.

Normally, when we are beyond starved, even a Nutri-Grain bar will taste like home-made hot apple pie, so we were pretty shocked that Honey's Kettle Fried Chicken did not taste like the juiciest, most flavorful bird dipped in diamonds and deep fried in liquid gold. It was just... *eh*. Both the chicken and fish were fried deep dark golden brown, with a few of the usual fry bubbles punctuating the smooth coating. Around the edges, batter had collected just short of escaping into frying oil freedom, creating an extra-thick knobby edge. The fried coating was thin, but rather than light and crispy, it was harder and crunchier. Harder and crunchier than what? Hm, we don't know - sort of the way expensive shiny black-bag potato chips are harder and crunchier than Lay's.

The chicken meat was tender, but we noticed that, like butter in an English muffin, a lot of oil had collected in nooks, crannies, and in any air space between the coating and the meat. Each bite was greasy enough that on a few occasions, we were certain that oil had either dripped onto the table or dribbled down our chin, leaving behind a shiny trail that would soon require a heavy dose of Stridex. Great. We eat fried chicken and end up with a pizza face. Perhaps they had not drained the chicken and fish well enough after frying, though we can't imagine that THIRTY EIGHT MINUTES wasn't long enough to turn that chicken into a chicken-flavored Snackwells bar.
We didn't like the catfish in the Porterhous Combination at all. It is a whole catfish, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to eat, even though you use your hands. There are bones. There are fins. There is about what feels like 1 ounce of catfish flesh in the whole thing, and it's stuck to the bones and the fins. Not pretty. Not tasty. We should have gotten the fish filet.

The French fries were a mix of steak-cut fries and regular fries, but they were broken, dry, and tasted about 38 minutes too old. Something about the broken fries made me feel like they had been scraped from the bottom of the barrel. French fries are French fries, though, so we ate them anyway, dipped in accompanying slightly spicy, very tangy barbecue style sauce. Dipped in the sweet, creamy dressing of the coleslaw, the fries were even better.

The highlight of lunch was the buttermilk biscuit, for which we promptly abandoned the half-eaten chicken. Biscuits are one of our all-time favorite baked goods, and we will admit that we have *ahem* on occasion, driven through KFC wild-eyed and craving-crazed, to purchase a single buttermilk biscuit for thirty nine cents. Honey's biscuit is dimpled in the center, which I am sure has some scientific significance. The biscuit is not as flaky as some others, but it has a finer crumb, making it the most tender biscuit that has ever melted into butter and honey in our mouth.

Honey's Kettle Fried Chicken tastes good. It is definitely better than Church's, KFC, and Popeye's, but we can't say that it tastes like its prices, and we promise the thirty eight minutes didn't bias our tastebuds. However, the ridiculous waiting time did taint the overall experience, and that does most certainly influence our decision to return (or not).

Honey's Kettle Fried Chicken
9537 Culver Boulevard
Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 202-5453
www.honeyskettle.com