Mr. Elhawary said he opened his first store, Al Salam Farms, in East Los Angeles in 1984. The zoning laws there were less restrictive than in Central Los Angeles, and he knew there was a need. “Muslims were looking for a place to get chickens that were slaughtered in the halal style,” said Mr. Elhawary’s nephew, Ahmed. “There was a need for the Islamic community to create a store that slaughtered the poultry according to the Islamic way. If you were Muslim and if you had to eat halal chicken or beef, you did without it, or you bought it frozen from elsewhere. And Muslim folks from this community had to travel to places like the Inland Empire, Riverside and San Bernardino to get their animals before this one opened.”

Mr. Elhawary and his brother-in-law, Safwat Elrabat, who co-owned the store before he passed away, had no background in the live poultry business. It made their first few years challenging. But they expanded their clientele with help from the rooster on the roof, and with targeted outreach to shop owners they believed might need a poultry supplier.

One such store owner was Kim Prince, who this fall was sampling the pollería’s chicken for her new restaurant, Hotville Chicken, which opened on Dec. 17 in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall. Ms. Prince, 47, comes from a family of restaurateurs, but Hotville Chicken would be her first personal venture and the stakes felt high.

One day in October, she was in the process of what she calls “baptizing the bird” — dropping the chicken into boiling hot grease — while Mr. Elhawary’s son, Yasser, answered her questions about the prices and sizes of chickens. The conversation turned to Ms. Prince’s secret sauce. She said the hot chicken recipe had been in the family since the 1930s when “one of my great-uncles had a special lady friend that got back at him for doing something wrong to her.” Layering spices on the chicken, Ms. Prince continued: “She put a lot of cayenne pepper on his chicken, but he actually ended up liking it. My other uncles got together after that and perfected the recipe with the help of the community and the church.”