Best of 2020: Fried chicken takeout in the San Fernando Valley

Editor’s note: Restaurant critic Merrill Shindler says there are many wonderful options for takeout food — cuisines that “travel well,” as he says. We asked him to highlight six of his favorites. … Previously, he wrote about barbecue and Chinese food. Here, it’s fried chicken. And in the days ahead, look for his 2020 restaurant picks serving sushi, Mediterranean cuisine and pizza. Watch this space: www.dailynews.com/author/merrill-shindler

My favorite takeout fried chicken

The Original Barrio Fiesta of Manila

16150 Nordhoff St., North Hills; 818-920-3900

The fried chicken at The Original Barrio Fiesta of Manila in North Hills is a wonder, a joy, a thing to behold — chicken transmogrified into an exercise in “crispitude” and crunch, with a lot of flavor tossed in for good measure.

It’s actually so well deep-fried, it’s hard to believe there’s a chicken inside the crust. But there it is, and quite a bit of chicken at that. The chickens used by Barrios Fiesta are…enormous, massive birds, so big that a half chicken is the size of a whole rotisserie chicken at Ralphs.

And they’re not packed with layers of fat like the rotisserie chicken at Costco (and yes, I am an aficionado of rotisserie chicken). These birds are all meat, aside from bones so crispy, you can chew them, if such is your druthers. Take home a whole bird — you won’t regret it.

There’s plenty of flavor in the crust at Barrio Fiesta. Which is a theme in just about every dish — enormous portions, and tons of flavor, more than seems possible at moments. Consider the lumpiang Shanghai — finger-food-sized egg rolls packed with ground pork, shrimp and a garden full of vegetables. You take a bite, expecting the usual squirt of grease and salt, and wind up with an explosion of more flavors than you can process in a single bite.

Or perhaps the crispy posit — fried squid made extraordinary with a dipping sauce of garlic and vinegar. Garlic and vinegar are major flavor elements in Filipino cooking, as definitive as the crispiness. And they’re flavors that do not sag or weary the palate as you keep consuming them. Unlike, say, hot sauce, there’s no palate fatigue. You just keep wanting more and more.

This is food that calls to you, telling you it’s time to keep the fiesta going.

Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.