Lemony Roast Chicken

Pollo Arrosto

It sounds simple, and it is: nothing more than chicken, olive oil, rosemary, lemon, and garlic. But when chef Evan Kleiman began serving this rustic Italian-style roast chicken at Los Angeles’s Angeli Caffe back in 1984, it turned out to be everything her customers were craving—honest food prepared with minimal fuss. Serve with rice or buttered noodles.

1 3½ -lb. chicken, cut into 8 pieces

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

½ cup fresh rosemary leaves

¼ cup fresh lemon juice

10 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1 lemon, peel removed, pith and pulp chopped Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Serves 4

1. Toss the chicken pieces with the olive oil, rosemary, lemon juice, garlic, lemon, and salt and pepper to taste in a bowl. Marinate for about 1 hour.

2. Heat the oven to 475°F. Arrange the chicken in a 9 x 13-inch baking dish and add the remaining marinade. Roast, turning once, until cooked through, 30–40 minutes.

3. Divide chicken between 4 plates and serve.

Family Style

Want to get to know your community? Open a neighborhood restaurant, and be lucky enough to have it stick around for a couple of decades. My little place in Los Angeles, Angeli Caffe, has been in business since 1984 on the wacky end of Holly-wood’s Melrose Avenue. The space was a former screen door shop that my partners and I turned into a restaurant with very little money and lots of good will. At the beginning, we were hip, so hip, feeding a generation of partying boomers who were eating out every night. But over the years, I watched our customers go from dancing fools to sleep-deprived new parents to mature stewards of a younger generation of tattooed hipsters. When I was growing up in L.A. in the 1960s, there was nowhere to get food like this; you couldn’t even buy fresh basil at the supermarket. It wasn’t until I went to Italy that I discovered the simple goodness of dishes like lemony roast chicken, dishes that most of us take for granted today. Opening Angeli was my way of bringing that kind of beautiful comfort food home, and connecting with the people I prepare it for.

—Evan Kleiman