The joint: La Olla Criolla, 1584 E Main St, Rochester, NY, 14609, (585) 270-4757
The meal: Small fried chicken dinner with plantain
The check: $8.00
The story: This town is filthy with excellent Latino food.
If your thing is pernil, beans and rice, plantains and fried, stuffed appetizers, you’ve got choices: El Latino, El Divino, D’Mangu and Soly’s Kitchen are all excellent. La Olla Criolla, specializing in Puerto Rican fare, has now joined with the list, with an impressive breadth of selections and high quality.
Like most of these places, La Olla Criolla gives you a choice of meal size, then you pick a main dish, a type of rice, whether you want beans on top and any other sides. My buddy, Scott, encouraged me to stick with a “small” meal, and that was a good call. It was puh-lenty.
Your expectation of “fried chicken” will be off from what you get at La Olla. Generally, we think of something akin to KFC and the like; it has a coating, a more-or-less spiced kind of batter. It results in a crispy shell over the skin and chicken. That can be awesome. At La Olla, there is not a batter; there is seasoning on the skin, but it’s the skin itself that is the shell. And oh, my is it good.
There are two kinds of people, yeah? Skin people and no-skin people. I am a skin person, and the skin on La Olla’s chicken is fantastic, succulent and just crisp, thin and peppery. Insider, the chicken is moist and flavorful. With the small dinner, I got a good-sized breast and a leg. Perfect.
There are three types of rice from which to choose. I had a yellow rice that had two kinds of beans (or, a bean and a pea might be more accurate). It was fragrant and not too salty as these dishes sometimes are. And it was a huge pile of rice for something described as “small.” I chose to have it topped with red beans in a pot liquor. And then I added their housemade pepper sauce, which surprised me by not being just vinegar with peppers. It added heat without adding much acid flavor, which allowed the flavors of the food to shine. Nice.
Seven bucks? Oh, come on. Screaming deal and immediately in the Cheap Eats Pantheon. I added a large piece of sweet plantain for a buck and my cheap soul had no pang of conscience at all.
The options: So many. Chef Javier Gonzalez tells me it’s been a lot of hard work, but worth it. La Olla might just have the most main options of any of the local Latino restaurants: baked chicken, stewed chicken, pernil (roast pork), ribs, stewed steak, lasagna (this is what they called it!), fried pork, fried pork chop, king fish ($2 extra), tripe (also $2) and more. The array was daunting, and it all looks muy bien. Scott went with pernil, which was rich and tender (they didn’t give him skin, which suited him fine, but I would have asked).
On my second trip (with The Man with Three First Names), we tried baked chicken and the ribs. Both were falling-off-the-bone tender and delicious. The Frugal Wife had the chicken leftovers for dinner and said it was the best chicken she’d ever had. She really said that. I’ll get a different thing on each of my next half-dozen trips.
Then there are the other things. I had never tried a pastele before, so that was a must ($4 for one, two for $7). Pasteles are a version of a tamale, a masa concoction, spiced and stuffed with meat, then wrapped in a banana leaf and boiled. Apparently a holiday food in Puerto Rico, you can get them any time at La Olla Criolla. They’re soft outside with ground, spiced meat inside, and the spicing is subtle and complex. Like other foods at La Olla, the pasteles aren’t as salty as I’ve found things to be at other Latino restaurants, and that allows the aromatic qualities to shine.
Scott and I tried a chicken and cheese empanada, though there are half a dozen kinds ($3 for one, $5 for two). The filling was flavorful but the star was the crust. Empanadas usually are somewhere on the bready-to-flaky scale, with the best ones have a buttery, flaky pastry worthy of a fancy restaurant. These are that. Stuff it with mud and it would still be good. Also very interesting were surullitos, which look kind of like a corn dog, but the similarity ends at the look (and corn). It’s corn meal, filled with cheese and fried. It’s a little sweet, but not a dessert, and has a wonderful texture akin to polenta.
And there is a pile of desserts I was too stuffed to try. Life is hard. Gonzalez makes his own flan, cheesecake (chocolate fudge or strawberry) and chocolate fudge brownies (all $3).
Don’t forget to ask…
…for a fish fry. I did not, but the fried pieces of fish looked just outstanding, with a gorgeous, golden, crispy-looking battered crust that made my mouth water. Next time.
Adam Wilcox has been accused of actually being a corn dog, although he’s not sure why. Follow him on Instagram at @foodonthefamily.
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