First Person: Where My Dad’s Restaurant Used to Be

The Chicken Roost in downtown Providence served 2,000 dinners daily. Photography courtesy of Paul Kandarian.

I’m a hungry eight-year-old boy hanging out one Saturday in my father’s restaurant, The Chicken Roost, a long, squatty building on the corner of Fountain and Union streets that he owned for about ten years in the capital city. My busy dad is running around, dare I say it, like a chicken with its head cut off in one of the city’s most popular restaurants in the heyday of 1961 downtown Providence. He hands me a brown tray with a mound of his famous fried chicken.

“Where do I eat?” I ask.

“Just go eat in a booth,” he says, pointing vaguely behind me. “I’ll join you in a minute.”

So I go to the only booth I know in an era known for their proliferation: the phone booth at the back of the restaurant, near the circular metal stairway that leads to the office upstairs. I put the tray on the seat, close the folding door, kneel down and start to eat in the cramped space.

Moments later, my dad is frantic, unable to find me. When he does, he flings open the door and says, “What the hell are you doing in there?”

“You said go eat in the booth!” I cry out, my dad roaring with laughter.

A reporter from The Providence Journal across the street comes in for lunch, my dad tells him the story and the next day it appears in a tiny blurb in a column that prints snippets of everyday life in the simpler times of “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”

I have many fond memories of a city in those days I recall draped in dark tones of the times, from hump-fendered cars that spewed smoke and clogged city streets to the fashionable fedoras and cloches on the men and women who strolled them. But none are fonder than my times at The Chicken Roost.

To this day, chicken is one of my favorite foods, especially fried, and I can still taste the way my dad made it. And I can see him doing it, a young muscular WWII vet in kitchen whites and a curly, tight black mop of hair, sporting a Niven-esque ’stache and dark mischievous eyes.

At its perch opposite the Providence Journal building. Photography courtesy of Paul Kandarian.

The Chicken Roost began life in the early ’40s by his uncle, Al Kandarian, and was a hit. The Greyhound Bus station was next door and sailors from the Newport Navy base would flood the city looking for food and drink, the restaurant cranking out 2,000 dinners a day to feed them and Doorley’s Tavern, said to boast the longest bar in the state, providing liquid refreshments. Rocky Marciano, it is said, ate at The Chicken Roost when he was in town to box.

When my dad had it, I remember Danny, a bus driver and steady customer, calling me to his table one day and teaching me the joys of dipping french fries in ketchup, not dousing them in malt vinegar the way my family did. I’ve not doused a day since.

The city was very Italian at the time and so was Union Street. My dad’s close friends and fellow business owners were Paul (Guglielmo) the barber and Sal (Laterra) the tailor. I got my hair cut at Paul’s into my twenties and also hit up Sal for occasional tailoring work. It’s all gone now but the memories remain, like Paul having a fake ear in a jar of formaldehyde near the mirror as a joke. At least I think it was fake.

The chicken the restaurant cranked out was succulent and tender, making it a hit for toothless minor league hockey players who got beat up pretty good over at the old Rhode Island Auditorium on North Main. “They’d come in and just gum it off the bone, busted noses, stitches and all,” my dad would marvel for years after.

The Greyhound bus station next door dropped off hungry sailors from the Newport Navy base. Photography courtesy of Paul Kandarian.

Another favorite memory was the technology of the time that included this big cement-mixer-style drum in the basement. They’d toss potatoes in and the abrasive interior would leave them peel-free; they were then forced into a cutting machine for uniform fry making. To prepare the chicken, they’d blanch the bird, let it cool, then dust it in flour and batter it, using a secret recipe that Uncle Al took to his grave.

I can still smell that chicken and practically taste it to this day, and can still see my young, fit and trim father dipping the chicken into bubbling oil and schmoozing with customers seated on red stools at the counter as he served them. He died in August 2013, my mom following a month later. My memories of The Chicken Roost are some of the earliest I still cherish.

A couple of years ago, my lady and I were staying at the Dean Hotel on Fountain Street in Providence and were strolling toward City Hall. We walked toward a parking lot on the corner of Union Street when it hit me: This was where The Chicken Roost stood.

I leaned into the fence there now, awash in memories, visualizing that phone booth, feeling myself running up that circular staircase to hang out in my dad’s office, hearing the lively chatter of the restaurant, smelling that chicken and seeing my father lording over it all.

My father, for better or worse, was known for his woulda-coulda-shoulda philosophy of life. One of his biggest regrets was getting rid of the restaurant by the mid-’60s, saying for the rest of his life, “I could’ve been Colonel Sanders before he was” and ruing not having more of an inheritance to leave us.

Chickens, it is famously said, always come home to roost. And thanks to you, Dad, so do the memories, and I savor every tasty one.