Triplet’s Blue Store II

The blue-painted building sticks out. Is it a gas station? Why are there so many people here? It beckons us to change our lunch plans. The busy little shack is mostly full of neighborhood people. We knew we were in the right place when we saw a local chef, conspicuously dressed in his kitchen whites, sitting down to eat with his family.

Most of the business at this location of the Blue Store uses the drive-thru. This is a fine way to receive some of Triplet’s legendary fried chicken. It travels exceptionally well and is packed with care. There’s no good reason to eat on premises, unless you’ve got no where else to go, but, in that case, they do their best to make it presentable. Flower arrangements on the tables are a very hospitable touch.

No matter what part of the bird, every bite has a full blast of salt and spice. It’s hard to resist comparisons to Popeye’s, the chicken that put Louisiana up there with Kentucky in the Fast-Food Hall-of-Fame. This is basically the better, cheaper, home-spun version of the spicy Louisiana chicken that we’ve learned to crave.

Every piece is good, but Triplet’s is especially known for its wings, which sell by the sack. It makes sense: Breading is the star , and wings offer the most surface area.

Fried rice reveals that the kitchen here has the wok skills to pull off a convincing American-Chinese take-out venture. Shrimp are plump, if tiny, and rice is nicely seasoned but mellow enough to leave room for the flavor-bomb chicken. We prefer the rice to the usual potato log accompaniment, but they make a pretty good version of that too. 

If nothing else, this little shop is a great place to grab a bag of Cajun pork cracklin’. This pork skin is so crunchy and well-seasoned that it might be hazardous to eat without something to wash it down with. It’s not proper Cajun, cracklin’, but more like chicharones: tasty in its own way, and equally jaw-breaking. 

As you take your food, you will be offered little packets of soy sauce, hot sauce, and ketchup. We take them as a precaution, but they aren’t necessary for food so throughly seasoned. If anything, adding ketchup would water down the spices and salt on this bird. 

This LSU-adjacent branch is the second in the small empire of dirt-cheap fried chicken and fried rice stands in Baton Rouge. The first Blue Store feeds the students at Southern University on the North edge of town.