Pollo Con Papas: Two Guatemalan fried chicken stands, one Richmond parking lot

There are two of them. That’s the first thing you notice.

Same block on Macdonald Avenue, same blue tents strung with bare bulbs, same red tiered shelves holding steel pans and squeeze bottles. Same clamshell containers. Same prices. Pollo Con Papas and Pollo Con Papas Fritas, two families who, workers at The Lot said, know each other. Set up maybe fifty yards apart on a Tuesday afternoon in downtown Richmond, both frying chicken in open air next to Richmond's Main Street. Both flying the same banner underneath their stand names: Estilo Chapín.

Twelve dollars: two pieces of chicken, fries, ketchup, green chile salsa, mayo. The Lot, downtown Richmond.

Eleven dollars gets you one piece of chicken and fries. Twelve gets you two pieces and fries. You stand there doing the math, then order the two-piece because you’re already here.

In the back of the tent, someone is cutting russet potatoes by hand with what looks like an industrial French fry press, pushing whole potatoes through in a single motion. The fries that come out are thick, almost steak-cut. You can taste the difference.

Before they come out of the oil, red chile powder goes in. Not on top afterward. Into the oil itself. Both stands do it.

The fries arrive golden and substantial, still crackling when the three sauces go on: red first, then bright green chile salsa, then white mayo, zigzagged across the container in quick succession. The chicken is fried but not overdone, with enough craggy crust to catch the sauces.

The banner on the front of the tent reads Pollo Tradicional. The back wall says Estilo Chapín.

Pollo Con Papas Fritas stand at The Lot in Downtown Richmond.

"It's chicken and fries," a man waiting for his order tells us. "It's Guatemalan food."

We went twice. Both stands are family operations, and we're not going to rank one above the other here. But we know which one we'd visit first.

Cutting Boulevard has its menudo. San Pablo Avenue has its Baja California border food: handmade tortillas, adobada and cheese-pull mulitas. Twenty-third Street has its birria and, a few blocks away, Nicaraguan fritanga.

Richmond has been collecting cuisines and traditions for a long time that don't replace one another so much as pile up side by side.

Sitting there with sauce on your fingers and thick fries spilling from a clamshell container, it's easy to start tracing the route south. Through Mexico and into Guatemala, the same continent all the way down. Richmond has a way of putting those journeys in a single parking lot.

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