LOS ANGELES — The creators of Umami Burger, who boasted of producing a whole new taste and who went on to expand from a single Los Angeles restaurant to a national franchise, are hoping to do the same thing again, this time with chicken. And chocolate.
At ChocoChicken, which is to open in downtown Los Angeles sometime over the next month, there will be white chocolate in the mashed potatoes and dark chocolate in the ketchup. There will be palate-cleansing chunks of chocolate in bowls on the table. There will be whoopie pies for dessert. And there will be, in the defining culinary gesture here, chocolate in the chicken, a marriage of two seemingly disparate tastes consummated in a ceremony of marinating, dusting, frying and rubbing that takes the better part of 24 hours.
“There are two things that everybody likes,” said Keith Previte, a chef who developed the idea and brought it to Adam Fleischman, the founder of Umami Burger. “Chocolate and chicken. And when you combine chicken and chocolate. ...”
There will be limits. Mr. Fleischman, who stepped down as chief executive of Umami to help lead this latest let’s-invent-a-new-taste mission, promised that at least one dish on the menu will be chocolate-free: the bacon muffins.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/dinin ... ref=dining)
