Yahoo Lifestyle Looking for comfort-food nirvana at this 50-year-old chicken pot pie shop
It was December of 1980, and Juan Valerio Garcia needed a job. The 17-year-old immigrant from Zacatecas, Mexico, didn’t have much work experience beyond a few landscaping gigs. He decided his best chance at landing a full-time job was to knock on some restaurant doors and hope for the best. One of those doors was Moffett’s Family Restaurant & Chicken Pie Shoppe in Arcadia.
Owners Raymond and Carmen Moffett hired Garcia as a dishwasher. What Garcia didn’t know at the time was that his first restaurant job would turn into a decades-long career that would eventually lead to ownership of the Moffetts' family business.
The Arcadia restaurant is a wood-lined time capsule from a decade when “dinner” meant a meal that includes soup or salad, sides, warm table bread and dessert. White curtains with tiny chicken motifs separate the well-worn booths in the dining room, there’s actual counter seating, and you can always tell which holiday is just around the corner by the decorations lining the wallpapered walls. The menu is a collection of dishes not often seen outside of your grandmother’s kitchen, including the namesake chicken pot pie.
Henry Moffett Sr. opened the first Moffett’s Chicken Pie Restaurant in Bellflower in 1958. The Arcadia location followed in 1975.
Moffett Sr.’s son Henry Moffett Jr. detailed the family’s history on the back of the menus at the Bellflower restaurant, which closed in 2007.
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“With 19 Moffetts working together in our restaurants, there are plenty of us to answer questions,” he wrote.
By 1987, Garcia had worked his way from dishwasher to baker to cook, becoming an essential part of the Moffetts’ operation and the preservation of the family’s most cherished recipes.
“He’s never called in sick or missed a day of work,” says Sandra Gomez, Garcia’s daughter, who now co-owns the restaurant. “Being an immigrant, that’s what you want to show, that you’re a hard worker and you add value.”
When owner Stan Burton was looking to retire in 2023, he asked Garcia if he was interested in taking over the business. In October of that year, Garcia, his wife, Consuelo, his daughter Sandra and her husband, Angel Gomez, became the new owners of Moffett’s, continuing the original family’s legacy with their own.
Sandra’s brother Roberto works as a night cook, her daughter Jocelyn waits tables and her son Joshua is a bus boy and sometimes works in the deli.
Sandra left her career in human resources to help her dad run the restaurant, and Angel is at Moffett’s whenever he’s not working for L.A. DWP.
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Not much has changed since Juan’s family took over, though Sandra and Angel are hoping to modernize some aspects of the business. Though neither is on social media, they asked their children to help set up Facebook and Instagram accounts for the restaurant. Customers can now order delivery and a website is also in the works.
“We didn’t want to change too much,” says Sandra, looking around the dining room on a recent morning. “We like the old-school diner and that’s what people want to see. It’s like going to Grandma’s house … that kind of aesthetic.”
Sandra brings over two small Rolodexes of laminated recipe cards that hold the Moffett family secrets for every dish on the menu. The plastic is fraying along the edges from all the cooks' hands that have held them.
“These are old, like a treasure,” she says. “We have been thinking that we need to digitize them.”
It was that sense of sameness that drew me back to the restaurant in mid-January. I had just returned to my Pasadena home after evacuation orders were lifted from the Eaton fire. I hadn’t visited Moffett’s since before the pandemic, but I felt a sort of primal need for something that felt familiar and stable. I sought solace in the dining room the Garcia family had so thoughtfully preserved over Juan’s 45 years at the restaurant.
My chicken pot pie dinner started with chopped romaine heaped onto a plate with a crown of three-bean salad on the top. The plate still felt too small for the amount of salad that spilled over the sides, and the ranch dressing still tasted homemade.
The bread roll sat high on its plate like a mini loaf, soft, warm and fluffy. Then came the chicken pot pie, buried under a thick, pale gravy. Next to it was a mound of mashed potatoes and a scoop of steamed carrots and peas. It looked like the TV dinner from the picture on the box, not the stuff that comes out of the microwave.
The potatoes were whipped into oblivion, impossibly light but luscious at the same time.
There was no gap between the pie crust and the filling. When I dug my fork into the flaky crust, it sunk into chunks of chicken suspended in gravy. It was the same rich, decadent gravy that covered the top, made from the chicken cooking liquid.
Juan and Pedro Ibarra, a cook who has been with the restaurant for 22 years, cook whole chickens in large steamers for the filling. Once the chickens are cooked, they make the gravy in the same steamers, cooking it over the course of a few hours.
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They make around 300 savory pies a day, each one filled with 16 ounces of white or dark meat chicken, tri-tip with beef gravy or turkey. The number of pies doubles in November.
While the Gomez family is committed to maintaining the spirit of Moffett’s, they have made a few welcome additions to the menu. You can now specify if you’d like dark or white meat chicken in your pies. Turkey pot pie was added after a particularly successful test run during the holidays. A kids menu was introduced to encourage more generations of diners, and after multiple requests, the restaurant now serves breakfast.
“We used to be closed on Sundays, but because we make the pies every day, we’d be in the kitchen and leave the door open,” says Sandra. “People would walk in so we started doing breakfast.”
The family also introduced daily dinner specials, with a board out front announcing the week’s meals. Recent menus have included meatloaf on Monday, beef stroganoff on Tuesday, baked pork chops on Thursday and baby back ribs on Saturday.
Sandra says some of her regulars come in seven days a week. Many are elderly and on fixed incomes. With the cost of everything from rent to labor and ingredients on the rise, Sandra and Angel say they are doing whatever they can to keep their prices steady.
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“We plan to increase breakfast prices because of the egg situation, but I don’t want to deter people,” says Angel. “In the morning we offer an early-bird special of 15% off between 8 and 11 a.m.”
“Me and my dad are the savers of the household,” adds Sandra. “We are always calling places to compare prices, making adjustments when an item goes up so that we don’t have to raise prices.”
At the end of my meal, once I’d scraped the gravy from my plate and I imagined I could feel the beige sauce sticking to my insides, my server came around and asked what I’d like for dessert. The chicken pot pie dinner ($20.95), like all the dinners on the menu, included a dessert of bread or rice pudding. A slice of fruit pie was an additional $5.45.
I took a pot pie to go and eyed the containers of potato, carrot and macaroni salads in the cold deli case on my way out. I made a mental note of the sign letting me know that if I brought an empty casserole pan in, the restaurant would fill it with pot pie. With everything else seemingly falling apart around me, that convenience felt like such a luxury.
The Garcia family hopes to be a comfort to diners over many more generations, and they want to do it together, as a family.
“For my dad, as long as he sees that his grandkids can learn and value this, then all the sacrifices and hard work were all worth it,’” says Sandra. “We are all a team, and he has something to pass down to us and them and that’s the biggest lesson of us all working together. We plan to keep it going as long as we can.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
