Gloria's Colombian Chicken

I've always been a huge fan of the Colombian chicken place on Fullerton just to the east of Kimball, but oddly, it has never gathered a huge swell of Chowhound support. There's not much to the place besides chicken. OK, chicken and a few odds and ends starches like twice cooked potatoes (why more placed do not do the baked then fried potato thing I do not know either) and sweet plaintains. This place never even had a killer salsa like El Llano. Still, who needs more when you have nicely marinated chicken roasted over giant hunks of mesquite charcoal?

This is axiomatic roast chicken. Ideal roasting leaves the skin taut over the meat, neither too crisp nor too slimey and the meat inside well lubricated but well free of any fat. The table green stuff provides some perk when you need it, but this chicken is such an ideal marriage of smoke, marination and pollo-liciciousness it hardly needs any sauce.

And this chicken place that I love so well, well it recently changed hands. The new owner is Gloria, hardly conversant in English, makes sure the roaster continues to turn out the same awesome chicken. Chicago has no large chicken culture, no mini chains of Polla a la Brasa or even Pollo Tropical like other cities, but we do have a few places doing a mean chicken. Gloria is one of them.