Restaurant review: The terrific Uncle Cs tells a little known story about fried chicken in Americ
The assumptions may begin even before you spot the free-standing sign just off Richmond Highway. The signage is sleek, with block lettering and a waffle logo in the shape of a chicken, trumpeting the restaurant’s name and signature dish. Uncle C’s Chicken and Waffles hints at family gatherings and recipes passed down from one generation to another. It suggests a shared history, or at least a loosely improvised connection, like Thelonious Monk riffing on a theme, to after-hour jazz clubs in Harlem and soul-food shops in Los Angeles.
Uncle C’s generates questions.
“Someone asked if it was a Black-owned business, and I told her, like, I’m one of the owners,” says co-founder Sam Bahary. “She was like, ‘Okay.' Her tone didn’t change, but she was kind of hoping that it was a Black-owned business.”
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“You could sense the disappointment,” interjects business partner Sayed Qayum.
Bahary and Qayum have a good sense of humor about the confusion that can arise when customers learn that the men behind Uncle C’s are not African Americans or Southerners or even Southerners by way of New York or the City of Angels. They’re Afghan Americans, whose families fled the country during the war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Afghan refugees latched onto fried chicken when they arrived here, Qayum tells me. He suggests they were following the lead of their neighbors from Iran who had fled the country during the revolution in 1979. Iranians, the theory goes, had developed a taste for Western fast food during Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign as shah and, once they landed in the United States, turned those predilections into their own fried chicken shops, which later influenced Afghan refugees.
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But news reports from the 1980s indicate Afghans were simply following their own lead in America: Taeb Zia had already emigrated from Afghanistan in 1972 and built a small fried chicken empire in the boroughs. His chain was named after John F. Kennedy, “just because Afghans like him a lot,” he told the paper.
“The Afghan incursion into chicken is a direct result of Mr. Zia’s involvement,” the New York Times wrote in October 1984. “In a kind of pyramid effect, he hired Afghan refugees who worked in his shops and then went on to open their own.”
All of which is to say that Afghans have a long history with fried chicken in America, one more absorbing chapter in the ever-evolving saga of the dish in our country. You could make the argument, in fact, that Qayum was born into the life. He was around 2 when his family moved to the United States, and his father’s first job was at another Afghan expat’s fried chicken shop. His father later drove cabs in New York City and saved enough to buy his own place, Royal Fried Chicken, in Schenectady, N.Y. By the time Qayum was in high school, he was working at a chicken shop himself.
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The entrepreneurial spirit runs deep in Qayum’s family, and after he drove cabs for a while himself in New York, he started searching for his own thing. He toyed with a number of ideas before returning to the business that had supported his family for so many years. But this time around, Qayum (along with his father, Mohammed, and his brother, Jalil) tweaked the traditional fried chicken concept ever so slightly. They opened Country Style Chicken and Waffles in Marlow Heights, Md., even though Qayum had never tried the combination before launching the business.
“The very first time I had chicken and waffles was in my own restaurant.” Qayum tells me.
Qayum sold his stake in Country Style and partnered up with Bahary, a childhood friend and fellow former cabbie, to open Uncle C’s in the postal service-designated section of Fairfax County known as “Alexandria.” Qayum is the uncle in question. It’s a nickname based on the pronunciation of his name in Pashto — and the respect Qayum has earned among his peers. “Sayed was always a little older than us, so we kind of looked up to him,” Bahary says, “We ended up calling him Uncle C, for fun.”
Uncle C’s is not a carbon copy of Country Style. The former feels more focused on the task at hand; its menu strips away the omelets, cheeseburgers and BLTs to seek a more harmonic alignment with Uncle C’s star ingredient, these crispy bird parts dredged in a mix of flour, garlic powder, paprika, salt and cayenne pepper. Qayum and Bahary have thrown themselves headlong into two of the most competitive segments of the fast-food business, the breakfast menu and the fried chicken sandwich, developing their own stylized options for each category.
Take Uncle C’s breakfast sandwiches, two of which feature miniature waffles, as cute as scampering piglets on TikTok. By its very design, the chicken-and-waffles brekkie sandwich is engineered for easy eating. Unlike the standard dish, with its separate components looking all janky and out of sorts on the same plate, this handheld bite seamlessly integrates the pair. Just as important, the brined breast meat gets an egg wash before the dredge, which makes for a thicker, crispier coating, which in turn emphasizes the snoot-full of garlic powder in the dredge. Drizzle (or more likely, smother) that chicken with a layer of syrup from the Smucker’s container, and you’ll be one happy customer.
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Uncle C’s has a requisite crispy chicken sandwich, and while it goes down fine, it mostly makes me miss the ones at Queen Mother’s and Mélange. If you really want a sandwich, I’d turn your attention to two other options, the Nashville and its cuddlier cousin, the Atlanta. Uncle C’s doesn’t take a scorched-earth approach to its Nashville sandwich, favoring instead a creamy dressing that cuts the hot sauce with a generous amount of mayonnaise. It’s messy. It’s hot (but not hellish). It’s delicious. The Atlanta features honey-butter, which, like the dressing for the Nashville, doesn’t hijack the sandwich. Its sweetness is sly, hiding in the shadows of that craggy piece of breast meat.
The waffles at Uncle C’s start with a mix from Carbon’s Golden Malted, which makes for an ideal base: airy, crisp and light. The hot cake is as much savory as sweet, and I dig its subtle chew. When you order the signature dish at Uncle C’s, the waffle is concealed in a cardboard container, with a pat of butter slowly melting into two intersecting lines in the middle. Your choice of chicken — wings, tenders or dark meat, each tinted a supernatural shade of orange from the paprika and cayenne — lounges atop the waffle. It’s a quality pair, for sure, and even better, the chicken, like everything at Uncle C’s, is halal.
What that means, from a practical standpoint, is that Uncle C’s attracts a fair share of Muslims. The customer base must remind Qayum and Bahara of home, and by home, I mean New York, New Jersey or any other place where Afghans began their journey into American fast food.
Uncle C’s Chicken and Waffles
6308 Richmond Highway, Alexandria, Va., uncleccw.com.
Hours: 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 6:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Friday; 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Saturday; and 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Sunday.
Nearest Metro: Huntington, with about a two-mile trip to the restaurant.
Prices: $1.89 to $29.99 for everything on the menu.
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