Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold described the chicken at the previously mobile-only Gourmet Grill Masters this way:
“The chicken at Grill Masters stands a cluck or two above the rest: extravagantly seasoned fowl cooked on rotating spits, perfumed with smoke, slow-roasted and glistening with juice, basted in its own fat plus probably a dozen other things, soft enough to eat with a spoon. And the skin! Like a thin sheet of crackly caramel, salty and drippy and saturated with herbs, chewy but taut and crisp enough to give way under your teeth with a magnificent thwack.”
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Now in its only brick-and-mortar store, the staple of farmers' markets
all over LA has finally opened in Irvine next to Kohl's and our 2011
Best Chinese Restaurant winner, Tri-Village.
I went in last Saturday, but I saw no chickens. Perhaps I came too early.
What I did see was a spartan room with no one in it (granted it was
about 11 in the morning). Two rotating spits had shawarma and
tarna meat. But what I'm looking forward to is that vaunted hen and the
skin that goes thwack.
Look for a Dueling Dishes post here in the near future.
14141 Jeffrey Rd., Irvine, (949) 988-7553; www.ggmirvine.com.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.