Eat This Now: Mémé’s Fried Chicken Platter

After two fruit-only lunches this week, I figured I had done enough penance to finally indulge in Chef David Katz’s fried chicken lunch at his popular Fitler Square restaurant Mémé. True to the chef’s beat-of-his-own-drummer ways, Mémé is open for lunch only one day a week — Thursday — and you can only get one thing: a plate of fried chicken (I had a thigh and a leg) with a warm, buttered biscuit, a tangy “secret sauce,” and a bottle of Miller High Life (or iced tea, if you’re not a lunchtime drinker), all for the bargain price of $11.

The yellow-skinned chicken is prepared perfectly crisp and just greasy enough to be fried chicken, with a sprinkle of coarse salt and black pepper, and there’s none of that off-flavor that’s made it impossible for me to consume supermarket birds. If you’re smart, you’ll do as my dining companion did (and, as it turns out, as the chef does) and make an open-faced sandwich of the thigh meat (and skin, of course) on one half of the biscuit, spread with a thin layer of sauce. The only complaint you’ll have is that you can only get it one day a week, though that’s probably a good thing.

Mémé, 2201 Spruce Street; 215-735-4900.