Chicken and waffles, so much more delicious than in chip form.

To my fairly unsophisticated palate, there is no finer combination that sugar and salt; in the immortal words of the ad geniuses behind Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, the ultimate sweet/salty combo. They are two great tastes that go great together, be they literally stuck together on kernels of kettle corn, welded together in the afore-praised pretzel M&M, or united on a plate in the form of chicken and waffles.

As a non-Southerner, I didn't know about this particular combination until my first trip to a Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, when I lived in LA. I'd had various incarnations of soul and southern food before, from random meat-and-threes in Atlanta and Charlotte to the old Pink Teacup in the West Village. While these places offered chicken, waffles, and occasionally both at once, Roscoe's has turned it into a fine art. In many ways, the chicken-and-waffle is the ultimate meal; it is sweet and salt, breakfast, lunch and dinner, grain and meat, gravy and syrup, all brought together in one glorious pile soaked in every imaginable kind of grease.

During my last visit to LA, I dragged another friend visiting from the Midwest to the Roscoe's on Pico, a.k.a., the Roscoe's with the most Dallas BBQ-esque ambiance and bright blue drinks. Even though I decided to go the "healthier" route—chicken sausage on a buckwheat waffle, as to allow for extra-caloric shared sides of corn bread, mac n'cheese, and candied yams, because yum and logic—it hit all the same, delicious, salty/sugary notes that make it worth driving to the west side, let alone flying to the west coast.

That said, the new Lay's Chicken & Waffle chips I got at the gas station en route to the airport taste like BBQ-flavored chips with an added sprinkle of bizarro maple syrup dust, the grease version of liquid-smoke, and poison. They are many bad tastes that taste bad together, badly, and unlike the real chicken-and-waffle-thing, a terrible choice.