Waffle Mixer

Tucked away on a Hollywood side street between the local gym and a hot dog stand named Big Weenies Are Better, drawing crowds that spill out on the sidewalk, Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles is the Carnegie Deli of L.A.’s R & B scene, a place where everybody goes, mostly because everybody goes there. At odd hours of the night, Roscoe’s hops with hip-hop gangstas and old-time crooners, funkateers and exponents of new-jack swing, athletes and bodyguards.

If you’re in need of a particular gospel bass player or the guy who did the arrangements for Luther Vandross’ last tour, you’ll probably run into him if you hang out around a chicken-liver omelet long enough. Roscoe’s may be the only restaurant in town where you can see both Roberta Flack and gangsta rapper MC Eiht. The pleasant reek of heated artificial maple syrup announces the presence of the restaurant more than a block away sometimes.

Roscoe’s branches have popped up in a lot of places, one (now closed) on the site of the legendary Tommy Tucker’s Play Room down on Washington near the old Parisian Room, another in a ‘50s coffee shop on Pico, one on Manchester in South-Central Los Angeles. There’s a gleaming new Roscoe’s on the fringe of the Bungalow Heaven neighborhood in Pasadena.

Considering its legend and everything, the original Roscoe’s is surprisingly small. The squarish, mirrored dining room is paneled with rough wood in a way that echoes mixing-room decor all over town and is set up in a baffling circle-in-square floor plan that resembles the two-tier layout of a 48-track control room. Maybe the secret of Roscoe’s success among musicians is this: It’s a restaurant that looks like a recording studio.

The hard-core dish at Roscoe’s, preferred by many of the customers who look as if they’d once spent a fair amount of time on the offensive line of the Cleveland Browns, is something called Stymie’s Choice, a daunting mountain of fried chicken livers sluiced in gravy, swamped in grits and garnished with a couple of eggs. Some people swear by the hot-water corn bread served at the beginning of the week, others by the house’s filling though bland version of red beans and rice.

The basic currency of Roscoe’s, of course, is chicken (a pleasant, if unspectacular, bird deep-fried in oil that is a little too hot) and waffles: big, round jobs that look and taste a little like Eggos on steroids, surmounted with an egg-sized piece of whipped butter that will eventually swamp each crenelation in the waffle when it melts. There are chicken-and-waffle combinations of every description: white meat or dark, smothered in onion gravy or left alone, served with grits or biscuits or nicely seasoned stewed mixed greens.

The combination of chicken and waffles may be a time-honored one in American cooking--Thomas Jefferson brought a waffle iron back from France in the 1790s, and the combination popped up in cookbooks not long after that--but as far as I know, nobody has cleared up the mystery of exactly how you’re supposed to eat chicken and waffles together.

Do you wrap the waffle around a chicken leg and chomp on the thing, watching carefully for bones, as if it were a pig-in-a-blanket? Should the waffle assume the essentially ornamental nature of the fried tortilla at the base of a tostada or the more fundamental role of the bread supporting an open-face hot turkey sandwich?

Or do chicken and waffles just happen to coexist on the same plate, having not much to do with one another besides the occasional happy splash of maple syrup on a succulent fried wing? We may never know.

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WHERE TO GO

Roscoe’s House of Chicken & Waffles, 1514 N. Gower St., Hollywood, (213) 466-7453. Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Also at 830 N. Lake Ave., Pasadena, (818) 791-4890; 5006 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 934-4405; 106 W. Manchester Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 752-6211. All major credit cards accepted. Beer and wine. Takeout. Street parking only. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $9-$15.

WHAT TO GET:

Smothered chicken, greens, waffles.