A Nu Quan

Located in a small Garden Grove plaza near Black Pearl Tea House and Grams BBQ, A Nu Quan is a Vietnamese restaurant with roughly two dozen seats and an abbreviated menu. The speciality here is chicken, served either as “clay jar grilled chicken” – more on that in a moment – or as your choice of either thigh, wing, or breast meat in pho soup, Hainanese chicken rice, or glass noodle soup. There are also a handful of drinks and several entree options (pork with lemongrass and galangal, goat with curry, fried rice cakes with eggs, or Vietnamese dry noodles with chicken thigh or wing), with egg rolls and fried rice crossed off the menu; that’s it. Most dishes go for $11 to $18, with the ability to add several side items for $3-9 each.

As the star of the menu, clay jar grilled chicken is probably the best reason to visit A Nu Quan, and a potential source of confusion for some guests. This isn’t clay pot chicken, and it’s also not “grilled” in the typical sense of that word: Rather than being served glistening as the product of steam-cooking with sauces and vegetables, clay jar grilled chicken is crispy-skinned yet tender inside after being baked in an oversized planting pot-sized vessel with many other chickens. While most of the entrees include a quarter chicken, Nu Quan also offers whole ($38.50) or half chickens ($20), solo or accompanied by chicken rice, crispy burned rice, or pandan sticky rice.