Henrietta in Echo Park is home to the best barbecue chicken in Los Angeles

Is there somewhere I should take my mom for her birthday that is trendy but also comfortable and not too expensive and maybe less than 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles?

My DMs are full of people I've never met who treat me like I'm their personal Yelp. It's an occupational risk I've accepted after years of writing about Los Angeles restaurants. The answer, lately, to all restaurant recommendation questions is Henrietta.

Ricotta meatballs are served in Madeira mushroom broth at Henrietta. The broccolini panini garnished with Henrietta potatoes (mashed, fried and sautéed with garlic aioli and parmesan cheese). The sandwich is offered during the day at the Echo Park restaurant. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

It occupies the corner of Glendale Avenue and a 500-foot-long stretch of asphalt known as Pizarro Street, on the same Echo Park block that has become a row of budding restaurants. While the sun shines, it's a deli and market, with sandwiches that have already captured the hearts of those willing to drive across town to pick up something between bread. An Italian sub with a one-track mind trained in spicy capicola. A panini stuffed with broccolini with romesco, sweet dates and smoked cheddar cheese. Instead of fries, a mountain of crunchy, creamy smashed potatoes topped with garlic aioli, buried under a blizzard of Parmesan cheese.

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When the lights go down, Henrietta becomes a cozy eight-table bistro with a concise menu of familiar dishes you'll probably find at dozens of other restaurants: beef tartare, half a chicken, rigatoni, all served on quaint, mismatched tableware that looks as if someone got up early to look for the good vendors at the Rose Bowl flea market. Only Henrietta does it better, in a comfortable, neutral-toned room that feels like a place for first, second, and thirtieth dates.

At the risk of sounding like I've stepped into my father's era, the dish I most enthusiastically recommend is the half chicken. In the hands of chef Alexis Brown, it should have the whole city talking.

It's served like a deconstructed Caesar salad, with a pile of bone-in chicken alongside fuchsia radicchio and croutons. The entire dish receives a drizzle of Caesar dressing with white balsamic vinegar. Butchers brown, then salt the chickens overnight and marinate them in a mixture of ancho and puya chiles, garlic and chipotle. They are grilled and then finished in the oven, which leaves the skin crispy and a little sticky. The meat is almost bouncy, with juices overflowing and mixing with the well-dressed salad. The croutons, made with torn and roasted Clark Street sourdough (the restaurant gets all its bread from the bakery a few doors down), are massaged with dressing while hot, making them crispy in some places and wonderfully soft and saturated as bread pudding in others.

Chef Alexis Brown uses the buttermilk she gets from making her own butter to create a creamy lemon vinaigrette for her seasonal avocado and pea salad at Henrietta.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

It's the antithesis of the chicken Caesar salad wrap that has the city suffocating. I understand the need to wrap things in a tortilla, but this is a chicken Caesar salad you'll want to pause, explore, and appreciate like a lover's silhouette.

An homage to Zuni Cafe's chicken and bread salad, it's one of the first dishes owner Max Lesser commissioned Brown to prepare for the restaurant. Lesser, a lifelong restaurant lover turned first-time restaurateur, will likely be the one to greet you at the door, no matter the time. Like many aspiring actors, he worked in diners throughout New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. When entertainment and restaurant jobs disappeared during the pandemic, what I craved most was the warmth of a dining room.

Henrietta is named after the fictional mother figure Lesser created for Henry's Bear, a toy store her mother ran for decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rather than opening a place that focused on a specific cuisine, Henrietta was built around Lesser's appreciation for good hospitality, tapping into the aspects he loved most while waiting tables at the Publican in Chicago or Chi Spacca in Los Angeles. Mostly, I wanted to capture the joy and ease of settling into a space that feels familiar, even on the first visit.

And in Brown he found the perfect chef to make his vision a reality. The former Alimento sous chef is establishing herself as a pioneering acid queen who favors vinegar, pickles, citrus and layered textures. Recently, their raw bluefin tuna was seasoned with almost electric calamansi vinegar and blood orange vinaigrette. You ride the wave of acid, balanced by the mild sweetness of the onion pieces that are lightly pickled in the dressing. It's worth ordering a baguette to soak up every last drop of the vermilion liquid.

Henrietta occupies a corner of Glendale Boulevard in the Echo Park area of ​​Los Angeles. The dining room has only eight tables with sidewalk seating.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

The same goes for Brown's buttermilk dressing, which highlights the waste it saves by making the restaurant's butter. It's a tangy, creamy, lemony dressing that tops the seasonal salad. In May, she used it to dress thick slices of avocado, sliced ​​red onion, peas, and tangerine.

The beef tartare toast is what Brown jokingly calls “Sloppy Joe,” mainly because of its resemblance to the spicy ground beef filling. The meat is combined with a sweet, smoky romesco peppered with piquillo peppers, Fresno chiles, lemon, and plenty of charred onions. It is mixed with pieces of sourdough bread to unite and create a homogeneous texture. Arranged on top are dollops of cream and slices of pickled yellow squash. He is the most refined and balanced sloppy Joe in the entire country.

Each dish registers as comfort food, but I tend to find the most comfort in the ricotta meatballs. Like gnudi, quenelles have incredibly thin skin that collapses into pillows of ricotta cheese. They are served in a pool of extra-earthy, sweet Madeira mushroom broth, which drinks like a soup.

Katie Vonderheide, whom Lesser met while overseeing the wine program at Chi Spacca, is responsible for an eclectic list of bottles that mostly range from $50 to $90. I have Vonderheide to thank for a new obsession with Listan Blanco, a Spanish white grape grown primarily in the volcanic soil of the Canary Islands. Its beautiful, dry complexity—bright, a little smoky with a hint of saline—carried a recent dinner of splendid deviled eggs spread, tartare, and urfa-dusted roast pork collar into the polenta cake for dessert.

If you're still thinking about direct messaging me with a restaurant question, know that Henrietta is probably the answer.

Owner Max Lesser and chef Alexis Brown in front of the Henrietta mural. Henrietta's neutral-toned dining room is small but cozy. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)