Edy's Chicken & Steak - North Bay Village

[Sorry, this place has closed]

A couple years ago a sign went up on a storefront along the 79th Street Causeway for "Edy's Chicken & Steak". Then it seemed like nothing happened for nearly a year. Several months ago I noticed that, lo and behold, the place had opened up, yet the name still was not exactly luring me in. Chicken? and Steak? Umm, Ok...

Finally curiosity got the best of me and I peeked in and grabbed a menu. Well, this isn't just any "chicken & steak," but it's Peruvian style rotisserie charcoal broiled chicken - and even better, it's "famous from Falls Church, Virginia" according to the menu! After a little checking around, I learned that Edy's is reasonably well known in the DC area for its chicken, and even more so for the accompanying green sauce.

We got a whole chicken with a side of Peruvian potato salad (can also get french fries or yuca), which also came with a couple small green salads, for $16. The chicken was indeed good stuff - crispy well-seasoned skin, meat was hot but still tender and moist. But the star was the sauce - a spicy and herbaceous green chile sauce which just really perks up your taste buds. Another milder but slightly piquant mayo-based sauce (which the server could only describe to me as "white sauce") was also good. The potato salad was made with a mix of exotic Peruvian potatoes but a wee bit bland.

The menu also has a few steaks, a mixed grill with chicken, steak, pork chop and chorizo, and several different sandwich options. We've gotten take-out several times since my first visit (only the chicken, haven't tried the steaks) and the quality is consistently good. There are a few variations on side dishes, including yuca fries (decent if a bit bland), choclo (corn on steroids), and big slices of camote (Peruvian sweet potato). They also had several cakes in a display case and Peruvian ice creams (including lucuma flavored, which I thought was delicious - creamy, fruity and nutty, reminiscent of mamey).

The place itself is basically a fast-food joint and doesn't hold much appeal other than that it's clean and well-lit, but their chicken and the green sauce have found a regular spot on our take-out rotation. But I'll confess - this is all mostly just an excuse to link to this awesome ad they made (I'm a sucker for a chicken suit):





Edy's Chicken & Steak
1624 79th St. Causeway
North Bay Village, FL
305.864.9958

Offal Strange

In a piece on Houston restaurant Feast, Frank Bruni writes:

Feast would, in fact, be a gamble anywhere in America, because the menu doesn’t just slip in a little tongue here, a little liver there. It’s a full-on, extended ode to offal that has no real peer in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities that pride themselves on their epicurean adventurousness.

Umm, perhaps maybe you've heard of some guy in San Francisco named Chris Cosentino - has a restaurant called Incanto, is so dedicated to offal he runs a website called Offal Good? No? How about Cochon in New Orleans, where at any given time you can have rabbit livers, boudin, pork cheeks, hogshead cheese and pig-ear salad?

Look, the restaurant sounds lovely, much like the culinary version of a St. John cover band (one of the chefs spent several years there, and even the website tries to imitate the retro-minimalist look and feel of that bastion of nose-to-tail eating), and I'm all in favor of paying attention to the nasty bits, but let's not get carried away. Especially when less than a third of the items on the current menu on Feast's website actually feature offal. It's not exactly like the trend has eluded Bruni's home town, either, where a place like Casa Mono likely has a comparable number and ratio of dishes using "spare parts" (pig's feet, lamb tongue, sweetbreads, foie, cockscombs, tripe, bone marrow, duck hearts, pork belly anyone?)

Kvatchy McCrankypants

Boy, do I ever sound like a curmudgeon. Thanks, New Times, for letting me vent, and thanks, "community," for letting me be your spokesperson.