RESTAURANT REVIEW: El Pollo Rico is rich in chicken dishes

The sign above the front of the restaurant at 824 W. Capitol Ave. in downtown Little Rock still says "Country Buffet." But it's not the same country.

What used to be Dave & Ray's Downtown Diner is now El Pollo Rico ("The Rich Chicken"), and at first sniff, it would appear that the country is now Mexico. But if you delve a little into the menu, you'll find pupusas and fried plantains, which originate from farther south in Central America, including El Salvador.

The new owners have changed almost nothing inside except maybe a very little fresh paint -- the restaurant is just as down-at-heel as it was the last time we visited Dave & Ray's, with square and rectangular tables sporting cookie-ad-square tops and well-worn wooden chairs in the main dining room and lining the window in the front room.

The dominant front-room feature is the buffet -- $6 for breakfast (scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes, biscuits and gravy), $12 lunch (always some preparation of chicken; otherwise varying from weekday to weekday, including Taco Tuesday and fried fish on Friday).

Some of the offerings aptly reflect the restaurant's name -- every preparation of chicken we tried was, indeed, pretty rich, right down to the fried chicken leg and admirable roasted thigh-and-leg quarter we got off the buffet.

For example, our Quesadilla ($8), a recent off-menu lunch special, featured a large grilled flour tortilla cut into three parts, wrapping very juicy marinated fajita chicken with onions, red and green bell peppers and cheese. It was the only thing on the plate that was prepared to order: The fairly flavorful rice, soupy but tasty refried beans, lettuce, tomato and sour cream that accompanied it all came off the buffet.

El Pollo Rico's buffet is otherwise pretty pedestrian, but it makes some concessions to the Dave & Ray's clientele -- a couple of days a week it offers a decent, reasonably firm spaghetti in a surprisingly rich meat sauce; we also plucked from a buffet pan a separate, baseball-size, coarse-ground meatball with an unusual filler: rice.

We got an incredible bargain, even though it meant a sizable wait, in our pair of pupusas ($1.75 per, $7.95 for an order of five), stuffed flour tortilla pockets about the size of a compact disc. They're listed among the starters on the menu but, with the accompanying bowl of a spicy slaw, more than sufficiently filling to make a full meal. They're available filled with cheese (imported, we're told, from El Salvador) or a cheese-and-chicken mixture; you can mix and match. The vinegary slaw had just enough kick to make it appealing even to the slaw-spurning member of our party.

We mentioned the extended wait for the kitchen to produce our pupusas; we'd recommend sticking to the buffet if you're in a hurry. El Pollo Rico isn't open for dinner, and its six menu entree options -- Carne Asada, Costillas Asadas (marinated beef ribs), Chuletas Asadas O Entomatadas (pork chops) and Camarones Rancheros (all $11.95), Parriladas (beef ribs, pork sausage and a quarter chicken, $14.95) and Camarones Rellenos ($12.50) -- all seemed like too big an investment of time and labor for lunch, but we'll consider investigating them on future visits.

Weekend on 12/28/2017