KMC

by Alex

Chicken and chips have been a staple form of fast food in PNG ever since I have been coming here. I still remember fondly the kai bar across the street from the Rainbow Mart in Mt. Hagen where they added garlic to the oil they fried the chips (‘french fries’) in. After 8 hours in a PMV from Porgera and a month or two on a steady diet of rice and Maggie noodles the mixture of protein and grease — eaten in the privacy of a hotel room no less — provided a pretty primal form of solace, not to mention two days worth of calories. Since the late 90s the king of high-end chicken and chips in PNG has been Big Rooster, whose cartoony mascot and red, white, and blue signage once reigned supreme over Boroko and Town. But no longer. Since my last visit to the country a contender has stepped into the ring: KMC.

That’s KMC, not KNC. It stands for ‘Kenmaiety Chicken’. There are at least two branches of the chain, which my friends agree is a ‘chinese business’ (some versions of the logo do have Chinese characters in them) but which I think might be a chain from Singapore or Taiwan. The menus in plastic display stands which are scattered around the tables include images of bento meals which have been covered with small white stickers on which the words ‘not available’ have been handwritten in pen. I know these details because I recently visited the Moresby branch, which is across the street from Pacific Place (the premier high-rise building in Papua New Guinea) and in the same run down building as the Tribal Den Hotel, which is the kind of place where girls who look like they should be in high-school sit out side smoking insouciantly and appear to be waiting for — what is the polite way to say it? — a piece of the action. Just off the main drag of Champion Parade Ground, then, KMC is in the down-scale block of Port Moresby.

The restaurant is part of a two-story complex of store fronts which includes a wang ba I don’t frequent and some second hand shops. On the inside it is an extremely large, open space with plastic fast food tables — sort with brightly colored molded plastic seats bolted into a metal stand fastened to the floor, like the MacDonalds I used to frequent as a kid. The counter is wide and behind the attendants are the heated glass storage cases filled with various forms of fried chicken. Behind these you get a glimpse of the kitchen, where men and women in disposable paper hair nets prepare meals. The people who take your order wear visors with the KMC logo. Its more corporate branding than most restaurants or businesses in PNG have, and the seriousness with which KMC takes its business can be seen in the white piece of paper slowly peeling of the wall next to the cash registers which reads “a TEAM is MANY hands doing ONE job” in a vaguely elegant italic font.

The menu of KMC chicken is, as you might expect, tilted towards fried chicken. I think they may do burgers. In addition to different amounts and sizes of chicken and chips, they also have the ‘chop’ (a boneless chicken schnitzel with orange breading and a slight hint of cayenne pepper, which rates a chili-pepper super imposed on the image of it on the large picture menu hanging over the front counter), and a ‘mexican chicken wrap’ (tortilla with tomato, lettuce, chicken nuggets), and various ‘combos’ which combine chicken, chips, and a drink.

The color-scheme of KMC is yellow and bright green, with red highlights Like big rooster, it has adopted as its motto an image of the live version of the animal that you consume in the store — although the happy, anthropomorphic chicken in a chef’s toque which serves as KMC’s mascot is rather more closely observed than Big Rooster’s smiling, tremendous-chested paragon.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about KMC is the series of large posters which hang on the walls depicting people eating food. One poster near the cash registers is unusual in that it depicts a pretty young Asian woman attempting simultaneously to smile and lick an enormous soft-serve ice cream cone. More frequently, however, the photos are of children who are just moments away from eating food. One of the the most enigmatic of these posters features the torso of a white toddler (unusual in a country where most people are not white) emerging from the bottom of the frame, a beatific smile on his face — of longing? fulfillment? — wearing a pair of overalls over a collared shirt. His hands are lifted straight up, straining towards a Delicious Chicken Burger which is as large as he is. What makes this particularly unusual is the fact that these images are superimposed over the background of a beach, complete with saves and a seagull flying away. However, the beach scene is upside down — as if the Delicious Chicken Burger has been dropped out of a plane and the baby shortly afterwards, they are both about to be land in the water, and someone has hung the picture upside down.

Other pictures include: a round-faced child about to bite into an enormous drumstick which is immediately adjacent to some copy describing the benefits of feeding young children fried chicken, and another image of a young girl with tremendously round eyes who looks as if she is in some sort of trance state or has just been startled by a loud noise, who sits with her hands down on a table on which lies a bucket (to scale, this time) of fried chicken.

Perhaps my deepest regret about KMC is that my research now keeps me so sedentary that I can’t in good conscience eat the amount of chicken necessary to sample fully from the menus of both KMC and Big Rooster to decide who truly has the best chips in town. I will work on deciphering the Chinese characters in the logo, though.