Where can I find the best chicken pot cake

It was December 1980 and Juan Valerio Garcia needed a job. The 17-year-old immigrant from Zacatecas, Mexico, did not have much work experience about some landscape design. He has the feeling of landing a full -time job, it was to knock some restaurant doors and hope for the best. One of these doors was Moffett's Family Restaurant & Chicken Pie Shippe in Arcadia.

The owners Raymond and Carmen Moffett hired Garcia as a dishwasher. What Garcia did not know at the time was that Haytt Restaurant Job would transform in decades of career, which would eventually lead to the possession of the fabric.

The Arcadia restaurant is a wooden capsule from a decade when white curtains separate the worn boots in the dining room with tiny chicken motifs, there are actual seats, you can always find that your vacation is just around the corner. On the menu there is a collection of dishes that do not often remove her grandmother's kitchen, including the namesake -chicken.

Henry Moffett Sr. 1958 in 1958. The Arcadia location followed in 1975.

The son of Moffett Sr. Henry Moffett Jr. described the history of the family on the back of the menus in the Bellflower restaurant, which was closed in 2007.

“

Until 1987, Garcia Worki Haday had a boiling dishwasher to Baker and became an integral part of the most valued recipes.

“He is never sick or a working day,” Sandra Gomez, Garcia's daughter, who now came to the restaurant. “Being an immigrant is what you want to show that you are a hard worker and value.”

Anyone who retires owner Stan Burton retired in 2023, asked Garcia if he was interested in taking over the business. In October this year Garcia, his wife Consuelo, his daughter Sandra and her husband Angel Gomez became the new owners of Moffetts and continued the legacy of the original family

Sandra's brother Roberto works as a night chef, every daughter Jocelyn is waiting for tables and every last Joshua is a bus boy and sometimes works in the crazy.

Sandra left every career in human resources to help her father lead the restaurant, and Angel is at Moffetts who does not work for La DWP.

Not much has also changed, Sorry Juan's family too, even though Sandra and Angel hope to modernize some aspects of the business. Although it is more necessary on social media, they gather children to set up Facebook and Instagram accounts for the restaurant. Customers can now order the delivery and a website is also at work.

“Says Sandra and look around in the dining room at a recommendation tomorrow. “We like the dinner of the old school and people want to see that. It's like Grandma's house … this kind of aesthetics. “

Sandra brings two small rolodexes laminated recipe cards via the Moffett family for each dish on the menu. The plastic is from all the hands of the chefs that they kept.

“These are old, like a treasure,” she says. “We thought that we had to digitize.”

It was the case that this was the same. I had just returned to my house in Pasadena after evacuation commands from the Eaton Fire had been lifted. I hadn't visited Moffett's OCC. I was looking for Sosht in the dining room, which the Garcia family had so thoughtful about Juans in the restaurant.

My chicken-pot cake dinner began with chopped Romaine, which was piled up on the top with a crown of three ironing lettuce on the top. The plate style felt too small for the amount of salad that spilled over the sides, and the ranch dressing still tasted homemade.

The rolls sat high on his plate like a mini loaf, soft, warm and fluffy. The chicken pot pie, bury under a thick, pale sauce. In addition, there was a mountains made of potato puree and a ball of subdued carrots and peas. It looked like the TV dinner from the picture on the box, not the stuff that comes from the microwave.

The potatoes were forgotten, incredibly light, but evenly lush.

There was no gap between the cake crust and the filling. When I dug my fork, sank into the chicken cocks hanged in sauce. It was the same rich, decadent sauce that covered the top and was made from the chicken cook fluid.

Juan and Pedro Ibarra, a cook, have been in the restaurant for 22 years and cook entire chickens in large steamers for the filling. As soon as the chickens are cooked, make the sauce in the same way and cook over a few hours.

They make around 300 hearty cakes a day, each with 16 ounces of white or dark meat chicken, tri-type with beef sauce or turkey. The number of cakes doubles in November.

Anyone who has the Gomez family to maintain the spirit of Moffetts have some that we have Weelmes on the menu. You can now specify whether you want meat meat chicken in your cake. Turkey Pot Pie was added during the holidays after a particularly successful test run. A children's menu has been introduced to promote more generations, and after several inquiries the restaurant is now serving breakfast.

“Sandra, San Sandra:“ We used to be closed on Sundays, but because we make our cakes every day, we were in the kitchen and left the door open. “People went in, so we started having breakfast.”

The Faamily also presented daily dinner specials, with a board front announced the meals of the week. The latest menus included meat roasts on Monday, beef strobanoff on Tuesday, ported Chops on Thursday and baby ribs on Saturday.

Sandra says that some of the regular guests come in lovers a week. Many are older and with fixed income. With the cost of the house, the promotion, Sandra and Angel say what they can do to keep their prices stable.

Says Angel “In the morning we offer an early bird special of a 15% discount between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.”

“I and my father are the savings savers,” added Sandra. “We always call places to compare prices and machine adjustments?

At the end of my meal I first had the sauce out of my plate and imagined that the beige sauce was kept around on my inside, my server Cama and aslında. The chicken pot pie dinner (20.95 US dollars), like all dinner, contained a dessert bread or rice pudding on the menu. A pane of fruit cake was an additional 5.45 US dollars.

I also a pot cake to see the containers of the potato, carrot and macaroni salads in the cold Deli cover on my way outside. I assume the sign that lets me know that the restaurant when I brought in an empty baking dish. With everything else that apparently fell around me, this convenience felt like a luxury.

The Garcia family hopes to be a comfort for the guests over further generations and they want to do it together as a family.

“For my father, as long as he sees that his grandchildren can learn and appreciate this, the victims and the hard work were worth it, Sandra Sandra. “We are all a team and he has something that we can pass on to ourselves, and the greatest lesson from all of us who work together. We plan to keep it as we can. “