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If what Food & Wine magazine writes is true, then I guess it’s high-time to haul my ass to Jus Cookin’s, an unabashedly American-as-apple-pie farmhouse-cum-restaurant that’s hustled homemade soups, double-decker hamburgers, chicken pot pie, chicken salad sandwiches, chicken-fried steak, chicken Parmesan and fried chicken since 1988, when it opened in Aurora and later relocated to a canary yellow farmhouse in Lakewood.
The online version of the glossy food pub just released its listacle of the best fried chicken in the United States, and Jus Cookin’s was the lone Colorado restaurant to get a shout-out. Here’s what the scribes at Food & Wine had to say about the joint’s fried fowl:
This mom-and-pop restaurant batters its chicken, dips it in seasoned bread crumbs and deep-fries four pieces to order. That’s a half-chicken for dinner, with mashed red-skin potatoes, coleslaw, soup or salad and a home-baked white roll, for $12.99.
And this isn’t the first time that Food & Wine has bestowed accolades on the mom-and-pop chicken shop. In 2003, the mag included it on its “Bargains | America’s 75 Best Food Buys” list — again praising the fried chicken and “real” mashed potatoes.
Having never stepped foot in Jus Cookin’s, I’m now contemplating a journey. For those of you who have been there — and eaten the fried chicken — let me know if the bird flies right. I want to know if it beats out the fried chicken from Tom’s Home Cookin’, which I named one of my favorite 100 dishes in Denver in 2010.
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