Pollo Campero becomes a frequent flyer
LOS ANGELES – Norma Ramirez stepped off Delta Flight 1903 from Guatemala City with a backpack, a blue neck pillow and an aromatic carry-on: chicken.
Lots and lots of fried chicken.
In late March, Ramirez came back to Los Angeles after spending two weeks with her husband’s family. As she does almost every time she leaves her home country of Guatemala, Ramirez carried boxes of Pollo Campero.
Her husband had returned with a 12piece box after a trip in December, and now it was her turn to honor the ritual. This time, she was joined on the fivehour flight by 30 wings and an eightpiece combo.
“It reminds me of my childhood,” said Ramirez, as she wheeled three suitcases and her precious cargo on a luggage cart through Los Angeles International Airport.
For years, people have flown from Central America to the U.S. bearing Pollo Campero. Plane cabins become infused with the distinct scent of deepfried chicken. Relatives who otherwise avoid the snarl of the freeways at rush hour suddenly brave a trip to LAX to pick up their chicken-carrying kin.
The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily halted Operation Chicken Airlift after the international airports in El Salvador and Guatemala shut down a year ago. But now – with the airport restaurant locations open once more – the chicken express is back in business.
Not that there’s a shortage of Pollo Campero restaurants in the U.S. They number almost 100 nationwide, including 17 in California. A company spokeswoman insists that the U.S. outlets “use the exact same recipe and marination process as our Guatemalan partners.”
But for many Guatemalans and Salvadorans, the American chicken lacks a key ingredient: home.
The first Pollo Campero opened its doors in Guatemala in 1971, and the chain quickly spread across Central America. Soon after, civil wars erupted in El Salvador and Guatemala, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants left behind the people, places and things they loved to move to the U.S. Many settled in L.A., which as of 2018 had more than half a million residents of Central American origin.
Before Pollo Campero spread its wings across the U.S., the chain estimated that it sold more than 3 million to-go orders annually through outlets at La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala
and San Salvador International Airport in El Salvador.
For years, the joke went: If you don’t bring back Pollo Campero, did you even go to Central America?
When news came of the opening of a Pollo Campero in the U.S. – in 2002 in the Pico-union neighborhood of L.A. – there were more than 900 job applications. Patrons waited in line for six to eight hours. That outlet, which hit $1 million in sales in about a month, is now one of the chain’s best-selling restaurants worldwide.
Before the pandemic hit, to-go orders at the two Central American airports stood at nearly 400,000 annually, company executives said. While a dramatic drop, that was still a lot of pollo traveling coach to the U.S.
“It’s a way of remembering culturally what is offered in the country of origin,” said Douglas Carranza, chair of the department
of Central American studies at California State University, Northridge.
Cesar Valencia knows Pollo Campero originated in Guatemala a year before it came to El Salvador, where he was born, but says Salvadorans have “adopted the chain as our own.”
Valencia immigrated to the U.S. when he was 5, and it became a tradition to ask family members to bring Pollo Campero when they visited. Picking up a box in the airport, he said, “is the very last thing you can do to feel connected to El Salvador.”
“It’s the one thing, next to pupusas, that we all can relate to,” the San Fernando Valley resident said. “Even second-generation Salvadorans connect with it.”
When his parents brought back a small order from Pollo Campero after a monthlong trip to El Salvador, they heated up the chicken, but Valencia didn’t wait and ate it out of the box cold.
“I don’t think that the chicken is amazing, but what gets me every time is just that feeling of home,” he said. “When you miss home, you miss everything about it.”
Across social media, via a torrent of memes, tweets and Youtube videos, taste comparisons attempt to answer one question: Does Pollo Campero really taste different in Central America than in the U.S.?
There is one way in which Pollo Campero chicken is very different in Central America. American chicken has an enormous breast compared with that of a Central American bird.