100 Favorite Dishes: Fried chicken from the Pinyon

Lori Midson

The fried chicken from the Pinyon flies right

No. 96: Fried chicken from the Pinyon

The Pinyon has been open for less than two weeks, but already the Boulder newcomer is generating audible cluck for its fried chicken, and now we know why.

Executive chef/owner Theo Adley, who commands an exhibition kitchen surrounded by voyeurs, many of them local chefs, rubs his birds with a housemade chile and garlic paste sweetened with sugar and tarted up with vinegar, floods the fowl in buttermilk for 24 hours and dredges it in potato flour before it hits the sizzle of the frying pan and ultimately gets finished in the oven. The results are unassailable: armored with a vividly golden crust that adheres to the flesh, so juicy it drools, it's the kind of fried chicken that should be boxed and sold on the black market, right alongside the griddled cakes studded with corn and Adley's breakfast syrup, colored ebony with maple and molasses.

Hungry for more? All the dishes in our countdown are linked below:

No. 100: Italian wedding soup from the Squeaky Bean
No. 99: American Classic Burger (and fries) from Tarbell's
No. 98: E's clam linguini from Mangiamo Pronto
No. 97: Queso a la plancha taco from the Pinche Tacos wagon
No. 96: Prosciutto-wrapped jalapeño poppers from Tony's Market

In late 2009, we embarked on a culinary journey that took us through our favorite dishes in the Mile High City -- one hundred, to be exact -- as a precursor to the Best of Denver issue. Now we're back with round two, counting down (in no particular order) a hundred more of our favorite Denver dishes in a list that, by our imperfect calculations, should be wrapped up by the time the Best of Denver 2011 hits the streets on March 31. In the meantime, if there's a dish you think we need to try, tell us about it in the comments section below, or shoot us an e-mail at lori.midson@westword.com.