Fried Turkey in the Bay Area? One Richmond Couple Has You Covered

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you really don’t want to mess around with deep-frying a whole turkey.

“A lot of folks think it’s fun and games and look it up on YouTube,” says Phillip Mitchell, who runs Kim’s Louisiana Fried Turkey & Stuff in Richmond along with his wife, Kim Knox. “You drop a cold turkey in hot oil and it overflows, you could burn your house down.”

In other words, he says, “You can ruin your holiday real quick with just a few missteps.”

Mitchell, a veteran Bay Area restaurant manager, is happy to share the tricks of the trade with anyone who asks. (Firstly, you need to dip that big bird into the oil gradually, nice and slow.) Luckily, fried turkey lovers in the Richmond area have a much simpler holiday option: They can just buy their turkey from Kim’s.

Like so many other niche food businesses in the Bay Area, Kim’s Louisiana Fried Turkey began with a craving: Six years ago, Mitchell was looking for a place where he could buy a deep-fried turkey for Thanksgiving. That style of turkey has been a holiday tradition for Cajun folks in Louisiana going back nearly 100 years, and starting in the 1980s, it became something of a nationwide trend, especially in large swaths of the American South. A 1984 Times-Picayune article about the dish helped set off a “national cooking craze” — and may have indirectly caused two houses in the New Orleans metropolitan area to burn down that very night.

In Richmond, however, the dish did not seem to exist. So, Mitchell and Knox bought a fryer and set about starting a business. These days, they sell fried turkeys year-round, but their busy season is right now, from mid-October through March. On the three days leading up to Thanksgiving, Mitchell will cook 50 to 75 turkeys, all fried to order so that they’re crispy and piping hot when customers pick them up.

Mitchell, for his part, has honed his skills to the point where he’s now able to deep-fry six turkeys at a time — though, again, and it cannot be stressed enough, this isn’t something any backyard amateur should ever attempt.

Despite the hazards of the technique, the case for fried turkey is simple: Devotees like Mitchell and Knox say there’s no juicier or more flavorful way to prepare the bird. Too often, roast turkey functions as nothing more than a dry and bland canvas for the more interesting dishes in your holiday spread. Mitchell’s three-day process mitigates these pitfalls. First he brines the turkey for two days, then seasons it for an additional day, blanketing the bird with onion powder, garlic powder and a mixture of other spices.

The result, Knox says, is turkey that’s juicy, moist and “packed with flavor” all the way down to the bones, which many customers like to save for making soup. And while the true fried turkey connoisseur is going to want to plate their bird shortly after it comes out of the fryer to maximize the crispiness of the skin, the other virtue of this style of turkey is that it reheats extraordinarily well. In fact, Knox says, some customers will routinely pick up their fried turkeys early in the week in order to drive them down to L.A. or fly them out to Atlanta for Thanksgiving.

In addition to the turkeys, Kim’s also offers a selection of Southern-style sides for the holidays — including cornbread dressing, candied yams and New Orleans–style dirty rice. Knox, who was born and raised in Richmond, has family roots in Louisiana and says the side dishes are all family recipes for comfort foods that she and Mitchell grew up eating. “We tried to pick dishes that say family, that say Thanksgiving, that say good eating,” she says.