When the areas in The Hangar filled up, there was a buzz around the Jay Bird’s Chicken location launch. Fried chicken was among the polarizing subjects where everybody had their views about what was best. Long Beach was home to many standard-bearers, such as Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, Johnny Rebs’ True South Restaurant, and Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken. However, there were not many Nashville-style hot chicken options in Long Beach.
The fried bird product doused in a spicy sauce made with chilli peppers was all that Jay Bird’s Chicken offered. Besides a set of sauce options and some sides, the Jay Bird’s Chicken menu offered half a dozen fried-chicken food items.
Executive chef and former Saint Marc employee Jay Bogsinske masterminded the Jay Bird’s Chicken menu and lent his portrait to use as a wall caricature. Now, it was not your standard family-owned restaurant but rather was the latest inclusion in the Wild Thyme Restaurant Group. It was a group that touted many of its restaurant concepts as homegrown but managed around 20 eateries in many states on the West Coast and beyond.
After its launch, the posts of Jay Bird’s Chicken on social media announced that it must stop its daily operations as it ran out of food. So, as the location opened on the morning of a Wednesday, there were already a dozen people in line to enter it. Within minutes, that line doubled and started to snake around the food-court area of The Hangar. While it was perhaps a great marketing strategy, it made the staffers maneuvering its small open kitchen hustle. Watching that made it seem like it was plausible for it to wipe out the stock immediately.
It still takes time and some TLC to prepare quality fried chicken. However, after spending time in the queue for around 30 minutes, with 20 more people looking to get food, the people behind one would start to grumble and scoff at the rates. Jay Bird’s Chicken set $13 as the price of its chicken sandwich, without any sides, and used $11.50 as the rate for chicken tenders known as “big.”
This was not a cheap, drive-through chicken, though. The poultry at this location was cage- and hormone-free and completely natural. The location fried the poultry in 100% peanut oil. Guests could choose from five different heat levels for each product.
At the start of its journey, it only had around 50% of the items on its menu, including its chicken tenders and chicken sandwich. The combination of waffles and chicken featured fried tenders, mini-waffles, some sweet pickle options, and maple syrup. It used to serve the juicy chicken with a thin crispy batter coating as well as a few scraggly edges to offer customers a shattering and satisfying bite. The chicken product dubbed “medium” was so fiery that customers termed the experience of using it as ‘mouth-tinglingly’.
The chicken had a tender inner texture and a crunchy outer texture but begged for a greater amount of seasoning. It would have been ideal to have a quick seasoned salt sprinkling to round it off. As a customer, you had to have the Jay Bird’s Chicken waffles first unless you wanted them to become soggy.
The location offered the sandwich product on a roll with a soft crust and coleslaw, the so-called comeback sauce, and sweet pickles. The aforesaid sauce product was a savory mayonnaise-based smear. It was an extremely messy and massive dish. Do not make the mistake of choosing the sandwich product if it was made with the second-last heat level. Why? Because the heat would incinerate other layers of flavor in the product, including the delicate sauce.
