Honey's Kettle Fried Chicken

Honey's Kettle brands itself as a "new, old-fashioned company" and me being an enthusiast of oxymorons, I thought I would give this place a brief survey.

With two locations in the L.A. area, Compton and Culver City, my dining date and I (realizing that we left our gats at home) decided to play it safe and venture out to the location in Culver City. Located in the heart of Culver City downtown (yeah, I didn't know Culver City had a downtown either), this place is easy to miss due to the unconventional, diagonally, criss-crossy streets of Culver City.

It was relatively quiet when J. and I entered the place around 2:30 in the afternoon. The place was void of any customers, but that didn't detract us because we've heard so many good things about Honey's fried chicken, plus it didn't hurt that we were fungry! Neither one of us had a bite to eat all day. Luckily, we didn't set ourselves up for disaster because the chicken was finger lickin' goooood! (Oops, wrong place). We ordered the Family Pac (menu)...yes, two people can technically be a family.

The 8 pieces of crispy golden chicken came with 4 pillowy biscuits, 2 sides of fries, a choice of salad (we decided on potato salad), sliced sweet dill pickles and extra honey and hot sauce. OK, I honestly was expecting honey to squirt out of the chicken upon first bite, while fending off stray bees, but the chicken was only honey in color. If it weren't for the juicyness of the chicken and the flavorful skin...we would've fired off a letter to Honey's headquarters or (most likely) have eaten the rest of our meal in spite, with occasional growls at the restaurant staff. I had to improvise to make my chicken honeyful.

The real star of the show, in my opinion, was the biscuits, which almost tasted like a thick pancake (J. disagrees with me feverishly on this). Incidently, you can purchase the biscuit batter, which also serves as a pancake and waffle batter at Honey's Kettle (Boo yah, J!). I don't think you can butcher a hot, warm, freshly baked biscuit. The biscuit teamed with "rare" Vermont honey (the same "rare" one I saw on my last visit to IHOP and same "rare" one Costco sells in a 3-pack) and you got a biscuit Yogi bear would drop kick you for.

The fries were nothing out of the ordinary, they should have fried it in the left over oil used from frying the chicken, which I think would turn out sinisterly good. The dill pickles were too sweet and thus ignored, neither J. and I were fans of dill pickles to begin with. We cleared the sweet grease in our throats with a large, freshly-squeezed, ice-cold lemonade, which was very refreshing.

All in all, we devoured 6 out of the 8 pieces of fried chicken, all the fries, the pint of potato salad and passed out in our booth shortly after. Closing time came and we were awakened and ushered out of the restaurant (glad we didn't choose the Compton location).

9537 Culver Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
Downtown Culver City
Phone (310) 202-5453
Fax (310) 202-8063