Costco chicken bake meets weeknight galette

I love food court food. Not ironically, and not only in the nostalgic way one loves things that arrived alongside an adolescence spent under fluorescent lighting. I love the architecture of it: the trays, the paper cups, the strange little ecosystems that form around soft pretzels and fountain sodas and something served under a heat lamp that is, against all odds, exactly what you wanted.

I have a fiction novel that’s been simmering on the back burner for years about a woman who, after a major life setback, bides her time as a bourbon-chicken sample girl in her hometown’s dying mall, caught between plotting her next move and regressing with the manager of Hot Topic. In my head, the food court is practically a character of its own: the smell of wishing-fountain chlorine twisting around the aroma of an Auntie Anne’s pretzel; fake plants gathering dust beneath neon signs; floppy Sbarro slices; overstuffed Dinky Doozies; the particular melancholy of a place built to feel bustling even when half the storefronts have gone dark.

Then there are the other food courts: the ones tucked into Chinatown or Little Vietnam, sometimes at the back of a subterranean mall, where the décor may be strictly functional and at least one stall is serving the kind of noodle dish that rearranges your understanding of lunch.

And then there’s the Costco food court.

The Costco food court, of course, has developed a mythology all its own. There is the famous story of co-founder Jim Sinegal, who reportedly told then-CEO Craig Jelinek in 2013, “If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you.” The threat appears to have worked: launched in 1985, the quarter-pound hot dog and 20-ounce soda have remained $1.50 ever since, a price Costco has gone to somewhat extraordinary lengths to preserve, including eventually manufacturing its own hot dogs.

Around it are the other monuments of the form: enormous, improbably cheap slices of pizza; swirls of soft serve striped with strawberry sauce; giant photographs of each hanging above the concession counter like icons in a very specific American chapel.

And the experience is oddly democratic. You come. You buy. You sit.

The last time I went, on a packed Sunday afternoon, there was a small but persistent crowd hovering around the tables waiting for seats. At the table beside mine, an older man kept beckoning strangers over to share his. This, I learned, was his Sunday ritual. He lived alone, so he would come to Costco, stake out a table, eat lunch, talk to whoever happened to sit down and, sometime in the middle of the afternoon, head home to catch “the game.”

There was something bittersweet about watching him do it, although I suppose his ritual isn’t so different from mine.

My sister and I live in different states now. She has the Costco card; I have the plane ticket. We both have the gossip. And sometime over the last year, a ritual has emerged: we go to Costco, run whatever nominal errands brought us there, then sit down in the food court and split one of those ridiculous chicken bakes while we catch each other up.

If you have somehow escaped the chicken bake’s orbit, imagine a long, golden-brown bread roll stuffed with chicken, bacon and a deeply creamy combination of Caesar dressing, mozzarella and Parmesan. It is hot and salty and almost comically substantial — less a snack than a small architectural project — which is why one is plenty for two sisters with several hours of gossip ahead of them.

I love it.

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Which is perhaps why, standing in my kitchen recently with a round of pie dough, I started wondering what would happen if the Costco chicken bake underwent one very minor act of social climbing: What if you turned it into a galette?

The galette, which is essentially a freeform pie, is already one of the great weeknight forms — sweet or savory, rustic by design, deeply forgiving. It asks very little of you beyond something delicious to pile in the middle and the confidence to fold the edges inward without worrying too much about symmetry.

The Costco chicken bake provides the filling inspiration. Together, they become exactly the kind of Tuesday-night dinner I love: chopped rotisserie chicken folded with a quick Caesar-ish dressing, bacon, plenty of cheese and black pepper, all tucked into a store-bought pie crust and baked until the pastry is deeply golden and the filling bubbles at the edges.

It’s cozy and low-effort enough to make on repeat for just you and yours, but substantial — and just showy enough — to answer a last-minute “Come over for dinner!” text, too. 

The trick is not to recreate the chicken bake so faithfully that you simply end up with one lying open-faced on a pie crust. A chicken bake can afford a very creamy interior because all that sauce is sealed inside a sturdy bread tube; a galette, which would prefer not to collapse into a delicious puddle, requires a little more restraint.

So the Caesar-ish dressing here is intentionally concentrated: cream cheese for body, Kewpie for tang and richness, and a dab of white miso for the salty, fermented funk that anchovy ordinarily brings to Caesar. I use the zest of a whole lemon rather than its juice — lots of brightness, no unnecessary liquid — plus dried thyme, garlic, onion and enough black pepper to make itself known.

The rest is mostly an exercise in giving the original chicken bake slightly better accessories. Bacon and a little onion get browned first; low-moisture mozzarella supplies the requisite cheese pull while provolone gives it a little more character. Fresh parsley goes over everything when it comes out of the oven. 

Add a sharply dressed green salad, maybe something cold and fizzy to drink, and suddenly the food-court chicken bake has become a centerpiece.

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