The Look
LA Fresh Poultry, a halal-style butchery in Koreatown, caters to a diverse clientele of home chefs and professionals who want to be reminded of home.
Betty Figueroa, 52, rides the 720 Wilshire rapid bus for more than two hours every morning from her apartment in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles to her housekeeping job in Brentwood. It takes her another two hours — depending on traffic — to get back to the apartment where she lives with her mother, Deborah Hernández, 80, and her two daughters each afternoon.
This trek leaves hardly any time to cook, or at least, to make the traditional meals she grew up eating in Honduras. Now, Saturdays are dedicated to that.
Almost every Saturday, for the last seven years, Ms. Figueroa has walked to LA Fresh Poultry, a halal-style store known as “la pollería” near her home, to do her grocery shopping. The store stocks live poultry and rabbits, signaling its inventory with a plastic rooster on the roof.
“I’ve been coming to this pollería for years,” Ms. Figueroa said, walking back to her apartment carrying chickens in a plastic cart. “It’s easy to buy the things that we need to make the meals we have been eating since we lived in Honduras.”
The red, white and green building, faded in places by the harsh Southern California sun, is unassuming. But it serves as a mecca, of sorts, for the many immigrant communities of Los Angeles. Some families walk, some families drive, but all of them go for the same reason: to purchase fresh ingredients to make meals that remind them of home.
Customers with families from countries including Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Uganda and Korea idle in line, some of them calling home to confirm the amount of chicken and quail they need to buy. The sounds and smells of the chickens, roosters, pigeons and rabbits in the back of the store are faint and earthy, offering a momentary respite from the polished flavors of gentrification in Koreatown and in the nearby neighborhoods of Silver Lake and Echo Park.
“I am Muslim and feel good because I see every race and religion here,” said Josura Shilpy, 46, who immigrated from Bangladesh and stopped by the store recently to pick up a brown chicken for a homemade curry.
This welcoming culture is a point of pride for the owner, Abdul Elhawary, an Egyptian immigrant who came to Los Angeles with his mother in 1979. If the gregarious white-haired Mr. Elhawary, 68, isn’t behind the counter, he’s posted up in a plastic chair out front, greeting customers individually.
On an afternoon this fall, Mr. Elhawary greeted two older Bengali women, both regulars at the shop, who were wearing black burqas that only revealed their eyes.
“Small rooster?” Mr. Elhawary asked politely, lowering his hand to the ground. “No, no, no,” one of the women said, stretching out her arms. “We want big rooster! Big!” “Ah, O.K.!” Mr. Elhawary replied, and all three laughed. “The biggest and the best for you,” he said.
Mr. Elhawary’s business has expanded to include seven pollerías in the 35 years since he began selling live poultry. One of those stores, located in Huntington Park on the corner of Alameda and Florence, is the one where my family shopped, and that I visited frequently as a child. Like other Mexican immigrant families in the area, we went to the pollería to buy fresh ingredients for traditional dishes, including my mother’s famous posole.
My grandmother loved ducks and geese, so when she would come to live with us from Mexico, my aunts and uncles also bought live geese from the pollería as pets. We kept them in the backyard. I remember them as beautiful and regal — until the day I may have gotten a little too close and the geese attacked. (We stopped getting live geese after that.)
The pollería was originally intended for Muslim communities in Los Angeles who needed halal poultry, but when it turned out that a majority of Mr. Elhawary’s clientele was Latino, he simply changed the name of the place to Al Salam Pollería. (All locations are called Al Salam Pollería, LA Fresh Poultry and the pollería interchangeably.)
“Latinos are very similar to Arab folks, because both of us came to this country looking for a better life,” Mr. Elhawary said.
Back at her apartment after her grocery run, Ms. Figueroa prepared a marinade of cilantro, onion, chile dulce, garlic and tomato, for a soup called sopa de mondongo.
She said that before she spotted the infamous rooster on the roof of the pollería building, she had to journey through the city in search of fresh chickens — an excursion that sometimes took her hours.
“I used to have to take a bus to Chinatown,” she said, pouring the ingredients into an electric blender. “But then I saw the big red-and-white rooster on the roof and got off the bus and walked in.”
At this point in her life, Ms. Figueroa cooks meals to remember her home in Honduras and to help her daughters preserve their own cultural background. “My daughters were born here, but they also love this soup,” Ms. Figueroa said while poking holes in the chicken. “I remember the first time I ever made this soup in this country, I walked across the street to my cousin’s house and we let the mondongo cook for one day and combined it with plantains and carrots the next day.”
The diverse selection of poultry that the store offers, according to Mr. Elhawary, caters to the diversity of the store’s clientele. “The Russians and the Armenians come here for the red rooster,” he said. “African-Americans come here for the brown colored chicken, Bengalis love the old chicken, Koreans come here for ducks and rabbits, Latinos come here for young chickens, and Egyptians usually come here for quail and pigeons.”
June Park, the owner of the Real Chicken House, a restaurant in Koreatown that she runs with the help of her husband, has been buying her poultry from the pollería for almost two years.
“The store reminds me of the life I lived back home,” said Ms. Park, 49. “I like the idea of buying my chicken from LA Poultry because it reminds me of my home in the Korean countryside where we didn’t use a refrigerator. Everything was fresh, just like the chickens we get here.”
Ms. Park’s most popular dish, the spicy chicken stew, is rivaled only by her whole duck stew, both of which were learned from Ms. Park’s mother. While chopping jalapeños, Ms. Park reminisced about her years in the city. “When I arrived to Los Angeles in 2001 the first meal I made was a common fried dish with vegetables, beef, onions, and cooked flour and eggs,” she said.
A few blocks away from Ms. Park’s restaurant, is a diner and South Asian grocery store called Swadesh, which is also supplied by the pollería. Sharif Ahammed, 37, serves customers there an assortment of Bengali dishes, but chicken and goat curries are his specialties. A customer, who said his name was Ryan, was enjoying the chicken biryani recently, while also FaceTiming with his friend in Bangladesh. “This is the best food around,” he said.
Mr. Elhawary said he opened his first store, Al Salam Farms, in East Los Angeles in 1984. The zoning laws there were less restrictive than in Central Los Angeles, and he knew there was a need. “Muslims were looking for a place to get chickens that were slaughtered in the halal style,” said Mr. Elhawary’s nephew, Ahmed. “There was a need for the Islamic community to create a store that slaughtered the poultry according to the Islamic way. If you were Muslim and if you had to eat halal chicken or beef, you did without it, or you bought it frozen from elsewhere. And Muslim folks from this community had to travel to places like the Inland Empire, Riverside and San Bernardino to get their animals before this one opened.”
Mr. Elhawary and his brother-in-law, Safwat Elrabat, who co-owned the store before he passed away, had no background in the live poultry business. It made their first few years challenging. But they expanded their clientele with help from the rooster on the roof, and with targeted outreach to shop owners they believed might need a poultry supplier.
One such store owner was Kim Prince, who this fall was sampling the pollería’s chicken for her new restaurant, Hotville Chicken, which opened on Dec. 17 in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall. Ms. Prince, 47, comes from a family of restaurateurs, but Hotville Chicken would be her first personal venture and the stakes felt high.
One day in October, she was in the process of what she calls “baptizing the bird” — dropping the chicken into boiling hot grease — while Mr. Elhawary’s son, Yasser, answered her questions about the prices and sizes of chickens. The conversation turned to Ms. Prince’s secret sauce. She said the hot chicken recipe had been in the family since the 1930s when “one of my great-uncles had special lady friend that got back at him for doing something wrong to her.” Layering spices on the chicken, Ms. Prince continued: “She put a lot of cayenne pepper on his chicken, but he actually ended up liking it. My other uncles got together after that and perfected the recipe with the help of the community and the church.”
In 2018, the LA Fresh Poultry pollería was the site of protests by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Mr. Elhawary said. The group sponsored an advertisement that was installed on a billboard directly on top of the store’s roof for a month.
“PETA came here and protested because they thought that the animals here were being tortured,” Yasser Elhawary said. “But the animals here are treated much better than those coming from a big factory.”
“Were regulated by the government and we have safe practices and we make sure the animals don’t stay there too long and they live under a stress free environment,” he added.
The demonstrations were stressful, but they didn’t really affect business, Mr. Elhawary said, especially among clients who have been loyal for years. One such loyalist, Atef Yassa, said he has purchased poultry and rabbits from the store for over a decade, virtually since the day he arrived in Los Angeles from Egypt. On an October afternoon, Mr. Yassa, 40, gathered with a group of his friends to cook squab and rabbit at a home in the San Fernando Valley.
“I love the store because it was everything I missed from home in Egypt,” Mr. Yassa said, speaking of the pollería. “It has everything you need and it’s actually better than Egypt because it is fresher and I can buy everything there.”
Inside of the house, a woman named Iman Bahkit, 48, also of Egyptian descent, was cleaning the rabbit. Her daughters, Michelle, 15, and Hannah, 10, watched closely while their mother asked them questions about school. Neither daughter loves rabbit, they said, both preferring their mother’s grape leaves. But Ms. Bahkit hopes they will learn to emulate what she is doing.
“They are learning how to cook and I make it a part of their chores,” Ms. Bahkit said. “I think it’s really important to teach them that.”
In an hour the rabbit would be placed in the mulukhiyah, a jute soup, with garlic, onions and coriander.
“This is what we have been waiting for,” Mr. Yassa said, smiling at the food being prepared. “There’s nothing like having good food with people who you really like. The chicken store makes people like me feel at home and, I think, immigrants feel welcome in L.A. because of that.”
