Henrietta in Echo Park is home to LA's best fried chicken

Is there a place I should take my mom for her birthday that is trendy but also convenient and not too expensive and maybe less than 10 miles from downtown LA?

My DMs are full of people I've never met who treat me like their personal Yelp. It's an occupational hazard I've accepted after years of writing about LA restaurants. The answer to all questions about restaurant recommendations lately is Henrietta.

It sits at the corner of Glendale Avenue and a 500-foot stretch of asphalt called Pizarro Street, on the same Echo Park block that has become a burgeoning restaurant row. While the sun shines, it's a deli and market with sandwiches that have already won the hearts of those who like to drive across town to pick up bread. An Italian sub with a one-track mind trained on spicy capicola. A broccolini-filled panini with romesco, sweet dates and smoky cheddar. Instead of french fries, a mountain of crispy, creamy mashed potatoes smothered in garlic aioli, buried under a blizzard of Parmesan cheese.

When the lights dim, Henrietta transforms into a cozy, eight-table bistro with a concise menu of familiar dishes you're likely to find at dozens of other restaurants: beef tartare, half a chicken, rigatoni, all served on quaint, mismatched dishes that look like someone got up early to browse the good vendors at the Rose Bowl flea market. Only Henrietta does them better, in a comfortable, neutral space that feels like a first, second and 30th date spot.

While it may sound like I've stepped into my father's era, the dish I most enthusiastically recommend is the half chicken. In the hands of Chef Alexis Brown, the whole town should be talking about it.

It's served as a deconstructed Caesar salad, with a pile of bone-in chicken tightly packed next to fuchsia chicory and croutons. The entire plate is drizzled with spicy Caesar dressing and white balsamic vinegar. Brown Butchers then brine the chickens overnight and marinate them in a mixture of ancho and puya chiles, garlic and chipotle. They are grilled and then finished in the oven, leaving the skin crispy and slightly sticky. The meat is almost springy, the juices run wildly into the well-dressed salad. The croutons are made from shredded and grilled Clark Street sourdough (the restaurant sources all its bread from the bakery a few doors down) and are massaged with dressing while warm, so they're crispy in some places and wonderfully soft and rich like bread pudding in others.

It's the opposite of the chicken Caesar lettuce wrap that has a stranglehold on the city. I understand the need to wrap things in a tortilla, but this is a chicken Caesar salad you want to linger over, explore and appreciate, like the silhouette of a lover.

It's an homage to Zuni Cafe's chicken bread salad and one of the first dishes Max Lesser commissioned Brown to prepare for the restaurant. Lesser, a lifelong restaurant lover turned first-time restaurateur, will likely greet you at the door no matter the hour. Like many aspiring actors, he worked in dining rooms throughout New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. When entertainment and restaurant jobs disappeared during the pandemic, what he longed for most was the warmth of a dining room.

Henrietta is named after the fictional, maternal character Lesser created for Henry's Bear, a toy store his mother ran for decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rather than opening an eatery focused on a particular cuisine, Henrietta was built around Lesser's appreciation for good hospitality, taking cues from the aspects he loved most while serving at the Publican in Chicago or Chi Spacca in Los Angeles. Above all, he wanted to capture the joy and lightness that comes with settling in a place that feels familiar, even on the first visit.

And in Brown, he found the perfect chef to bring his vision to life. The former sous chef at Alimento is establishing herself as a pioneering acid queen, favoring vinegar, cucumber, citrus and layered textures. Recently, their bluefin tuna crudo was jazzed up with an almost electric calamansi vinegar and a blood orange vinaigrette. They ride the wave of acidity, balanced by a mild sweetness from onion pieces that are lightly marinated in the dressing. It's worth ordering a baguette to soak up every last drop of the vermilion liquid.

The same goes for Brown's buttermilk dressing, which highlights the waste she saves when making the restaurant's butter. It is a tangy, creamy, lemony dressing that coats the seasonal salad. In May, she used it to garnish fat slices of avocado, red onion slices, snow peas and mandarin oranges.

The beef tartare toast is jokingly referred to by Brown as a “sloppy joe,” primarily because of its resemblance to the savory ground beef filling. The meat is paired with a sweet and smoky romesco that's finished with piquillo peppers, Fresno chiles, lemon and lots of charred onions. It is mixed with pieces of sourdough bread to bind it and create a homogeneous texture. On top are dollops of crema and pickled yellow pumpkin slivers. It's the most sophisticated and balanced sloppy joe in the country.

Every dish is considered a comfort food, but the ricotta dumplings are the biggest relief for me. Similar to gnudi, quenelles have an incredibly thin shell that folds into pillows of ricotta cheese. They're served in a pool of sweet, particularly earthy Madeira mushroom broth that you can drink like soup.

Katie Vonderheide, who met Lesser when she ran the wine program at Chi Spacca, is responsible for an eclectic list of bottles, mostly in the $50 to $90 range. I have Vonderheide to thank for a new passion for Listan Blanco, a Spanish white grape grown primarily in the volcanic soil of the Canary Islands. Its lovely, dry complexity—bright, a little smoky with a touch of brine—accompanied a recent dinner that ranged from rich egg spread, tartare, and Urfa-dusted grilled pork neck to polenta cake for dessert.

If you're still thinking about sliding into my DMs with a restaurant question, know that Henrietta is probably the answer.