Running a South Los Angeles fried chicken chain
Un succès cambodgien aux Etats-Unis.
LOS ANGELES — In a restaurant rising from an overgrown parking lot at 91st Street and Central Avenue, fried chicken, chow mein and the occasional fist bump pass through holes cut in panes of bulletproof glass.
2.Behind the glass is a Cambodian immigrant family, and on the other side is the chain’s mostly black clientele. Bean pies and sweet potatoes are on the menu. So are whole pickled jalapenos.
3.The restaurant, part of the Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken chain, is a Southern California cultural mix tape: fried chicken, served by Cambodian refugees to black and Latino customers, from a chain founded by a white man from Michigan, Joseph Dion. 4.Dion started the chain in South Los Angeles in 1976, and it now has more than 148 restaurants in seven states and three countries. A big reason for the chain’s success, Dion said, is Cambodians.
FAMILY BUSINESSES
5. More than 80 percent of the franchises are owned by Cambodian-Americans. They work hard, have never sued Dion and run many franchises as family businesses, enlisting sons,
daughters and cousins for labor and paying themselves what was left over.
6.The franchise owners — many of them refugees — shared an understanding of poverty and struggle with the neighborhoods in which they are located. And they are frugal, getting by on far fewer profits than their competitors, turning survival into a bona fide business strategy, said Michael Eng, a Cambodian refugee who recently took over the entire chain. “If there is a Kentucky Fried Chicken on one corner, a Church’s on another and Popeye’s on the third one, I will open a Louisiana chicken on the fourth. I will try,” said Eng, 46.
THE COMPANY HISTORY
7. Eng was born during a period of civil war and attempted genocide that killed nearly 2 million people in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. In 1992, he joined thousands of refugees and fled to the United States. Eng, 18 at the time, took a job mopping floors at a Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken. It was the only work he could find.
8.Three weeks after Eng came to the U.S., the acquittal of police officers who beat motorist Rodney King sparked the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Rioters burned down three Louisiana restaurants, Dion said. Few investors wanted to sink money into South L.A. That’s when Eng bought an aging taco stand at 91st and Central and converted it to a Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken.
9.For the next few years, he felt as if he had traded one civil war for another. Eng’s wind- shield was shot up three times that first year. On his first day running the restaurant, police investigating a homicide roped off his street before he could close for the day. Eng slept in the restaurant until the streets reopened at 5 a.m., then drove home for a shower. At 8 a.m., he came back and reopened the store because he couldn’t afford to close.
10.For six months, he broke even by working 14-hour shifts by himself and paying himself what was left over after costs, which wasn’t much. He didn’t have money to advertise, so he gave out free samples and made a diet of leftover chicken. He had spent his entire life savings on the fried chicken restaurant, and he could not afford to fail.
11.Survival, Eng learned, meant refusing to take sides in conflicts between police and gangs. He told drug dealers and gang members to keep crime out of his shops, but he rarely called the police because he wanted to maintain peace — and because it often took officers hours to arrive.
12.He tried to show respect to his mostly black clientele, Eng said, and some of them eventually returned it. And as his truce with the neighborhood grew, the number of Louisiana chicken restaurants doubled.
A SUCCESS STORY
13. In 2009, Eng bought the Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken name from Dion, borrowing money from his friends and family to afford the steep price tag.
14.He also repurchased his first restaurant at 91st Street and Central Avenue, paying four times what he sold it for. Developers, who want to build apartments on the property, have offered him far more, but he has turned them down repeatedly, he said.
15.On a recent weekday, he revisited the restaurant and began to reminisce. He noted how much safer and cleaner the neighborhood seems and pointed out where he had to remove tables and benches because prostitutes used to congregate.
16.That first franchise helped pay for four sisters and a brother to go to college and allowed his mother to retire. It was the down payment for his Lexus. His sweat has soaked into its floors. Its grease has splattered burns across his forearms and hands, one of which has lost so much feeling that it no longer flinches from the sizzle of the fryer.
17.He holds up his hands and imagines telling his children the stories written in the scars. “These are what made me who I am today,” Eng said.