Best Fried Chicken

4501 Manchester Avenue, eatduckbill.com

If you taste love in the fried chicken Grant Heman serves at his food counter, Eat Duckbill — and it's impossible not to — it's because of its origins. When Heman's daughter, Chandler "Chooch" Heman, was a little girl, she was a picky eater, and one of the few things that she loved was popcorn chicken. It became their thing, and over the years, Heman perfected his popcorn chicken game, serving it not just for Chooch but for family meals at the various restaurants where he worked around town. Eventually, it became the basis for a business opportunity when he was approached by Meredith Barry and Tony Saputo to run the food counter inside their bar, Platypus, and soon it became one of the Grove hotspot's biggest draws. No mere bar food, Heman's chicken is perfection thanks to his insistence upon doing things right, even if it requires tremendous effort. Heman's standards are exacting; he begins with whole chicken thighs and butchers them on-site, producing as perfectly symmetrical elongated cube shapes as he can make from an asymmetrical raw product. He brines the meat, weighs out his flour and seasoning to the gram, and hand-breads every portion to order. The result is a stunning, bite-sized nugget so succulent and subtly sweet from its brine that you wonder why all chicken can't taste like this. One bite and you understand why Chooch was so picky: When you have something this good available to you, how could you eat anything else? —Cheryl Baehr