A winning recipe in South L.A.
Cambodians serve up fried chicken in neighborhoods they understand
In a restaurant rising from an overgrown parking lot at 91st Street and Central Avenue, fried chicken, chow mein and the occasional fistbump pass through holes cut in panes of bulletproof glass.
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 jalapeños.
The restaurant, part of the Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken chain, is a Southern California cultural mixtape: fried chicken, served by Cambodian refugees to black and Latino customers, from a chain founded by a white man from Michigan, Joseph Dion.
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.
More than 80% 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.
The franchise owners — many of them refugees — share an understanding of poverty and struggle with the neighborhoods in which they are located. And they are frugal, getting by on far thinner 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.
Dion came to Los Angeles from Michigan in 1957 with nothing in his pockets and an inclination to work in restaurants. He managed one of the now-defunct Sir George’s Smorgasbord House chain buffets and two Jack in the Box restaurants in Orange County before deciding to launch his own chain.
After a month in his garage with a 30-pound fryer, experimenting with a recipe he says he obtained from New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme, he arrived at a product: chicken in a zesty Cajun batter fried to a soft crunch and finished with a slight, spicy heat.
Dion opened the first Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken in 1976 on a corner lot at Vermont Avenue and Imperial Highway.
Dion wanted black owners to run the first few stores because they were located in black neighborhoods. But he also awarded a franchise to a family of Cambodian refugees.
After some of Dion’s first franchises went out of business, other Cambodians took them over.
By 2009, 90% of the 100 or so restaurants were Cambodian-owned. And most of those owners were friends of a particularly enterprising and ambitious employee: Eng.
Eng was born during a period of civil war and 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 f loors at a Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken. It was the only work he could find.
His experience was common among Cambodian refugees in Los Angeles, said Erin M. Curtis, a historian who has written about Cambodian immigrants.
About 50,000 Cambodian Americans live in Los Angeles County, where studies show a majority have suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Shifts in welfare and refugee policy meant that Cambodians got less aid during that time, Curtis said. Desperation drove many to settle and start businesses in impoverished neighborhoods with high crime and low rent.
Thousands went to work in the doughnut business, in which earlier waves of Cambodian immigrants already had bought shops and found jobs. It was a short hop from frying doughnuts to frying chicken, Eng said. Somewhere along the way, Louisiana restaurants added Chinese food. It’s unclear where those recipes came from, but Eng said many Cambodian franchisees converted existing Chinese restaurants to the Louisiana brand and simply kept takeout Chinese cuisine on the menu.
By the time Eng arrived in America, there were about 50 Louisiana franchises, the vast majority in South Los Angeles, where the chain proliferated despite a roiling backdrop of racial unrest.
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.
For the next few years, he felt as if he had traded one civil war for another. Eng’s windshield 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.
For six months, he broke even, 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 savings on the fried chicken restaurant, and he could not afford to fail.
So that first night, when reporters and police officers came to ask him whether he knew anything about the killing, he told them he hadn’t seen anything.
He hadn’t. But it didn’t