Jidori Chicken

Dennis Mao’s Jidori Chicken, the downtown L.A.-based Wagyu of poultry, is spreading its wings this month with a move from its former digs in the shadow of the Fashion District to new, much larger headquarters farther east in the industrial corridor. The fresh nest will allow the local fine dining phenom—already a go-to source for everyone from Wolfgang Puck to Nobu Matsuhisa—to better build on its national reputation, which has grown rapidly of late.

“But we’ll always be a niche, specialty, mom-and-pop thing,” says Mao, 41, who quietly launched Jidori 16 years ago by selling the birds door-to-door out of a cooler from his SUV (his family has long been in the local food-distribution business). “It’s definitely not about turning ourselves into a mini-Tyson or anything like that.” Still, at the new location, the boutique slaughterhouse will eventually up its daily chicken-processing count to 15,000, keeping in check with the seemingly insatiable demand for the birds at top-tier kitchens around town and beyond.

“It’s just a fantastic, beautiful product,” says Celestino Drago, the chef/entrepreneur who rotisseries Jidori chickens at his Enoteca in Beverly Hills and cooks them sous vide at his Centro outpost in the downtown Financial District. “It’s about how they’re raised and how they’re processed. I mean, sometimes they are still warm when they arrive at our door—they are that fresh!”

How they’re raised: no hormones, free range, vegetarian diet, on farms in the San Joaquin Valley (the term jidori means, roughly, “from the earth” in Japanese). How they’re processed: still ruffling their feathers when they show up at 3 o’clock in the morning for slaughter, never frozen thereafter and always in chefs’ hands within 12 to 24 hours of being killed. “We’re using the livers so it’s a delicate thing,” says chef Brian Moyers of BLT Steak on the Sunset Strip, which serves a chicken liver pâté amuse-bouche to every table. “And the texture? Everyone goes wild.”

At this point, Jidori is seemingly all over town, a requisite offering everywhere from Culina, Lucques and Valentino to Jiraffe, Hatfield’s and Rivera. It’s gotten to the point where to serve poultry and be taken seriously, it’s simply got to be on the menu. “The quality is hard to beat, it cooks so perfectly,” says chef David Myers, who has made it a staple at his Comme Ça on Melrose, whether in a potpie at lunch or as a breaded breast diable preparation at dinner. “I mean, you just get it so quickly… you could do sashimi with it!”

Indeed, Jidori’s Mao does do sashimi with it, at Robata-Ya, a Japanese restaurant on Sawtelle that he opened in 2008 and co-owns with chef Mako Tanaka (who made his name at Chinois on Main). There, he can show off a few more parts of his chickens than most of his clients, as adoring as they may be, typically get a chance to do. It might not be the biggest seller right now, notes Mao, but give that poultry sashimi menu item some time to develop a following in L.A. “Jidori [itself] was something that people here wanted once they got educated about it,” he says.