Zankou Chicken
2424 West Ball Road
Anaheim, CA 92804
This restaurant review is way overdue. Certain pockets of OC are kind of hard for us to get to. Okay, it is more like we are too lazy to drive and battle traffic to get to it. This area includes pretty much all of the northwestern edges of Orange County. I admit that cities like Buena Park, La Palma, Cypress, Seal Beach, Los Alamitos, and even Anaheim's western section are under-represented on this blog. As much as I love eating out and trying out restaurants, it's hard to justify sometimes driving an hour and a half in traffic just for dinner. So much easier to just stay close to home, get done eating, and watch some Netflix afterward.
So, when we are up this way for something, we try to combo it with a restaurant we have wanted to try forever. This was the case after watching our beloved Ducks lose a challenging game on a recent Sunday evening. With the earlier start times for Sunday games, it's easier for us to grab dinner after the game instead of having to rush to eat before the game. So we headed fifteen minutes from home on Ball Road and arrived at Zankou Chicken at around 8pm.
This Times Square strip center located on the corner of Ball and Gilbert, right next door to Magnolia High School, was pretty dreary on this rather chilly Sunday evening. Besides the laundromat at the far end of this strip mall and the pizzeria nearer to Zankou, not much appeared to be open at night. As sleepy as the shopping plaza was on the outside, the inside of Zankou was bright and bustling with activity.
We arrived at a very well-lit, well-staffed restaurant serving a nearly full dining room of a good cross-section of society that had come together at this relatively late dinner hour to enjoy some chicken. I don't think it had anything to do with the weird Times Square moniker of this shopping center, but this Zankou location reminded me of what I've seen of New York restaurants in the '70s and early '80s in movies and TV shows. Maybe the wood paneling covering the walls or the eclectic diners represented many faiths and countries, just like you'd see in NYC.
Zankou Chicken started out a long way from Anaheim. They opened up on a street corner in Beruit, Lebanon, just selling rotisserie chicken, and soon after came their famous garlic sauce. In 1984 the first Zankou Chicken opened in LA, and today they are operating nine total restaurants, all but this Anaheim location are located in Los Angeles County. The menu nowadays has expanded way past just chicken, but that's still the cornerstone of their business and what I spy on almost every table near where we are sitting this evening. After ordering at the register, we were given a buzzer and waited only a few minutes before our order was ready for pickup. We were excited to see if the hype from this place was warranted but, more importantly, try to drown our sorrows in chicken and garlic sauce after watching the lackluster hockey we witnessed from our Ducks.
Katie starts with her selection for this evening, the Chicken Tarna Plate ($12.99). I'm not clear what the difference is between chicken shwarma and this chicken tarna, and from what I have seen online, tarna is something that the Zankou people have made up. Not sure why they would do that, but I'm sure they have their reasons. This was a big serving size for the price, and Katie only finished half of it. This marinated chicken is sliced off of the spit. Katie was not really too big of a fan of this, as she thought the chicken was a little on the dry side, which was cured a bit by alternating adding the tahini, garlic sauce, and hummus to the chicken. Maybe because we were here so late, the chicken had been sitting around a little too long. I thought it tasted fine, as I liked this seasoning. Katie is a garlic sauce aficionado and thought this was one of the better ones she has had. Not the best, but she definitely can see what all the hype is all about when it comes to their garlic sauce.
When this Half Chicken Plate ($12.99), or as the cool kids call it, The #3, was brought out, I thought it was one of the prettiest rotisserie chickens I have ever seen. The skin was crispy and had a nice light brown color, and the pickled turnips made this plate pop. Unlike Katie's meal, I thought the chicken here was delicious. The skin was flavorful, the meat underneath was nice and moist, and only the big chicken breast piece had any hint of being a tad dry, which is to be expected with such a big chicken breast. I also enjoyed the garlic sauce, which went well with the bird. The hummus was pretty good but did not wow me. Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the pita bread, but it was huge. At first, I did not like it because it was not as soft as others I have had, but I came to love the sturdiness of it as I dipped it into the hummus and garlic sauce.
Katie and I had a little difference of opinion about Zankou Chicken. I thought this was one of the better Mediterranean chicken spots around, but Katie is more partial to Chicken Maison, which we went to a few years ago. I like both, but I'd give the edge to Zankou because I like the crispy chicken skin on the bird, and I found their chicken to be moister than what I have had at other places. The delicious garlic sauce helped things out here and is very magical. Make sure to get some extra when ordering. The sides were fine but did not exactly wow us. The whole or half chickens are the stars at Zankou. Glad we finally made it to a traditionally hard-for-us-to-reach part of OC, and we hope to be back in these parts with more regularity in the future if we can get out of our lazy rut.
Out of five credit cards (because this restaurant has deep Beruit roots, and that city is the 10th most popular shopping destination in the world, so a credit card is essential there), five being best to zero being worst, Zankou Chicken gets 3 credit cards.
For more information about Zankou Chicken, head to their website here: https://zankouchicken.com/
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