The World's Best Chicken Comes From Hainan

Kevin Pang investigates the origins of Hainan chicken rice, the deceptively simple, wildly popular export of a sweltering island in the South China Sea where poultry is king.

- Kevin Pang

An old traveler’s adage: The more ramshackle the restaurant, the more soulful and satisfying the food find. So here I am at a spot in Wenchang, China, perched along the canal and facing Three Corners Street, with rickety tables, pink plastic lawn chairs, and tarps strung overhead that shade from the fierce sun. Several older men in flip-flops just sit here, for no reason other than it’s midafternoon on Hainan Island, and the air is so sweltering and sticky the smart thing is to remain motionless until sundown.

This restaurant specializes in Wenchang chicken, the hometown specialty, and it is called, fittingly, Wenchang Chicken Restaurant. The 63-year-old owner, Sung Shen Mei, tells me it has operated continuously here since 1927. His grandparents, he says, were the first to make a living serving the dish. 

When I ask to watch Sung cook, he brings me to a tight, greasy closet of a kitchen with a wood-burn ing stove heating a wok of simmering broth. Half an hour earlier, he’d rubbed the chickens’ cavities with salt and ginger and lowered them into the broth, beige from dozens of bird baths before it. Now, Sung uses two-foot-long wooden dowels to fish out the whole, head-on specimens, and they emerge glistening from comb to claw.