I first found out about the city of Lennox from my friend, Bill aka Street Gourmet LA. Click here to read his original post about it. Simply, the stretch of Inglewood, between Century Boulevard and 111th Street, is a residential neighborhood that has been zoned for businesses, which means that homes have been converted to restaurants and other Latino-owned businesses. As soon as the words “restaurant” was mentioned, my ears perked up and after some arm pulling (actually, it wasn’t that difficult to convince him), I brought together a few adventurous eaters from Pleasure Palate to do a 4 restaurant dining crawl led by Bill in Lennox or Lennoxico, as he affectionately refers to the city. Bill already posted his write-up on the experience, so I’m definitely behind the 8-ball, but such is the life of a food blogger. Technically, our first stop was at Don Rogelio, which is a Tex-Mex restaurant where we placed the order for food that we were going to share family-style.

As the Don Rogelio cooks were preparing our dishes, we walked over to Lennox Pollo to check it out and even pick up a bird or two. With its blue roof and orange walls showcasing chickens cooking over flames, Lennox Pollo was definitely not hard to miss.

Walking in, the small dining room area was about as big as the kitchen itself and just as hot. I have to give real props to the kitchen staff for being able handle their cooking duties in that heat. I would have melted away. As we waited for our chicken, all our eyes were on them. From skewering the chickens, putting them into the fiery oven, taking the cooked ones out and then cutting them to put in plastic containers for people’s orders and repeating, they got the job done efficiently and with purpose.

The end result was a juicy chicken that came with salsa and tortillas. You could get one for $6.99 or for $3.00 more, you could get two. Our hungry crew went for the twosome and luckily, Don Rogelio kindly let us devour our chicken along with the 6 other dishes we ordered from them.

Of those 6 dishes, two of them didn’t do much for me. The Carnitas Mole had a “Southwest”-inspired mole sauce that had a grainy texture and a sour tangy flavor that I didn’t like.
(Continued)