It's a Sunday night.
I'm at Achilles Heel in Brooklyn for a very special reason.
One of my favorite chicken dishes
of all time is served here.
Every Sunday,
as long as the weather permits it,
Chef Lee Desrosiers is cooking up chickens
on this incredible medieval chicken cooking apparatus.
Let's go in there.
Let's meet the man himself.
And then let's eat the birds,
and then I'm going to tell you all about
how delicious they are.
(lively music)
Tell me about the actual contraption
because this is obviously not something that you
can roll into a Restaurant Depot and buy, right?
A friend of mine is a metal worker,
so he just built us a frame.
I just needed a fire table,
essentially that I could build on top of.
He also made these pot stands right here.
What I did was I went to Home Depot,
just got a brunch of bricks,
put them all up here,
and got these pipes from Home Depot,
screwed them together and that was it.
You do this once a week,
only on Sundays.
So when do you get the birds in?
We get the birds in on Friday
and then we butcher them on Saturday.
So, I spatchcocked it and took the spine out.
I also,
with my knife,
I cut along the bones
and actually put salt inside here.
I also chop the ankles off to get some of the marrow out.
That just helps it smoke,
helps it cook a little faster and,
when it's ready to grill,
it's nice and flattened out for me,
so it's perfect.
They sit overnight in the salt.
Then on Sunday,
we light the fire around noon
and hang the chickens for two to three hours.
We put the two chickens in the solid cast-irons
and cover them with coals
so that they steam through to about 165 degrees.
We let those steam in their own juices and fat.
It takes about 45 minutes,
then we let them rest for about 30 minutes.
This is like a Transformer,
so I'll rearrange it
where I push all the coals under the grill.
We'll have a grill set up here so when an order comes in,
we, whether it's a half or whole chicken,
we cut it,
grill it on the live embers,
and throw it on the plate.
(upbeat music)
And there it is.
Thank you so much.
Cheers.
All right, so here it is.
Look at the char and the crisp on that.
It really is like,
it smells like pork.
That's amazing.
It's so, they've rendered so much flavor out of it.
This does look almost like pork scratching.
I'm going to go in there and try the white meat,
which is generally less flavorful than the dark meat.
But, in this case,
I bet you this tastes better
than most dark meat chicken of a commodity bird.
I was so right.
Oh my god.
I have to say that that does not taste
like white meat chicken.
It doesn't taste like any kind of chicken.
It tastes like duck.
It's got a profound flavor.
It's hard to describe it because it's so unexpected.
I think that's not just because it's been grilled.
I think that's because of the way
that Lee has really developed flavors over time.
I'm going to go in there and try the thigh,
which is generally my favorite.
By the way, look at that.
Look at the way it's just crisped up and charred.
You can see where he actually cut it
and salted it on the inside.
I'm expecting this to be supremely flavorful.
Wow.
Pleasingly salty.
It's almost like this thigh has
everything great about chicken,
whether it's a fried chicken or a roasted chicken.
This has those elements.
It's got that real crunch from the outside.
Now, this hasn't been battered or fried or anything,
but it's shatteringly crisp
because of the way that it's grilled.
You can see that it really does have,
it just flakes apart.
It's so tender.
It's like the whole flavor of that entire bird
just concentrated in that one thigh.
To me,
this is the greatest version of outdoor chicken
that I've ever had.
If you just sat down and ate this chicken,
you would love it.
It would be delicious.
But if you get to actually see how it's made
on this amazing contraption,
with all the flame and the embers glowing majestically,
I think it will heighten your awareness
and also your enthusiasm for this dish.
I generally prefer to eat four-legged animals
over two-legged animals.
But, in this case,
this chicken hits all of the right notes for me.
It really does kind of defy expectations.
With that said,
I can't encourage you enough to get down to
Achilles Heel on a Sunday and try out the Hell Chicken.
I'm going to finish this one off,
and maybe a few more.
I'll see you on the next episode of The Meat Show.