This Hialeah KFC made famous flan for 45 years. Here’s why it’s now off the menu
Dan Yagoda was proud to own the only Kentucky Fried Chicken in the world to bake its own flan.
That it was in Hialeah was a specific source of pride — a reflection of the Cuban community that embraced the city in the 1960s, when Cubans fled the revolution and made this blue-collar town their home. More than 45 years ago, an immigrant cook, a former chef in Havana, adapted the original 16-quart pressure cookers used to make the Colonel’s secret recipe chicken to bake a perfect flan with a secret recipe all its own.
Even after KFC stopped using those pots, this KFC at 811 W. 49th St. got special dispensation from its corporate office to keep making a flan silky and luscious enough to make any home cook jealous. Customers came with their own containers from as far as Key West and Tampa to buy entire flans around the holidays.
But anyone who visited the KFC around Thanksgiving in 2021 found a bitter surprise: The flan was no longer on the menu.
“The customers were unhappy about it. They were just very disappointed they couldn’t get it anymore,” Yagoda said.
You can blame a supply chain that made the key ingredients hard for KFC’s supplier to get, particularly because they weren’t used at other stores. You can blame a small staff that was overburdened, especially since only two people at that KFC (one of them partly retired) know how to make the flan from a recipe that has been passed down for 40 years.
And there was another culprit Yagoda never saw coming.
‘The perfect product’
That the flan lasted this long was a fluke. The only reason it existed at all was because franchisees were encouraged to make up their own menu items in the early ’70s, and this location, which Yagoda’s father had owned since 1970, experimented with everything from fried shrimp to Key lime pie. The late Baldomero Gonzalez, the immigrant Cuban chef, used to cook family meals for the staff before the restaurant opened, from fried chicken livers to chicken fricassee. He used ingredients from those dishes to make the flan bain marie in the pressure cooker.
The local community loved it. The 9-ounce, 650-calorie wedge sold for 99 cents for decades, a loss leader to get locals in the store. (It last sold for $2.89.)
When the world outside of Hialeah discovered the secret flan decades later, this KFC became a national story.
But in February of 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, Yagoda was diagnosed with cancer at the base of his tongue. He underwent 35 radiation treatments and three chemotherapy sessions in less than two months. He lost 47 pounds.
He passed the restaurant into the hands of longtime managers and the flan to the two flanaderos on staff — Blanca Rosa Ortiz, who works part time and Genero “Frank” Turcios. Ortiz had taught Turcios the recipe she learned from Baldomero.
For a while, the restaurant did better than ever.
“We had the perfect product: comfort food, it wasn’t expensive and you could get it delivered,” said Yagoda, who had worked for his father at KFC since 1975.
Meanwhile, Yagoda recovered. He regained healthy weight, and quarterly PET scans showed his tongue cancer was gone.
“I even got my taste buds back. And I was feeling fantastic,” he said.
But the pandemic dragged on. Workers were harder to come by, even as Yagoda says he paid $14 an hour. The flan ingredients became a luxury: Supply chain shortages meant even basic KFC supplies were rationed between stores. His supplier had a harder time just getting standardized items for the restaurant, and the condensed milk and eggs used only for the flan were not even part of what KFC regularly stocked. And Yagoda wasn’t approved to buy what the flan makers needed at a local store.
Yagoda, now 72, was getting tired. The price of real estate in Hialeah shot up, and he decided to sell the restaurant. The buyer, KBP Brands, owned 660 KFCs and 139 Taco Bells with an annual revenue of $1 billion as of August 2021, according to the Franchise Times.
‘There were a lot of tears’
In September, as the closing date approached, Yagoda went in for a routine PET scan. The result showed something unexpected — a 2.5 centimeter tumor on the tip of his pancreas. Yagoda had a different cancer, one of the most dangerous kinds. Fewer than 40 percent of people survive past five years, according to National Cancer Institute statistics.
“Pancreatic cancer is a very frightening thing — more frightening than I realized at the time,” he said.
Yagoda sold his three KFCs to KBP Brands in the first week of November 2021. A week later, he went in for surgery to have half of his pancreas and his spleen removed. Yagoda remains in a preventative chemotherapy protocol, where some weeks he can barely keep food down. But doctors have told him they caught it early, and he has a fighting chance.
“I have bad days like everyone who has to take this poison, but they’re confident it’s working,” Yagoda said.
He said goodbye to employees that had become friends, many of whom had worked at that KFC for decades. He sent many of the management team off with bonuses.
“There were a lot of tears,” said Susan Benitez, Yagoda’s director of operations, who had worked for him for more than 30 years, since she started as a Hialeah High part timer at 15. “It’s the end of an era, is what it is.”
Near the end of November, under new ownership, the flan disappeared from the Hialeah KFC menu. Customers who came in around Thanksgiving for their usual flan left empty-handed.
“We had people who used to come in just for the flan. I have to tell them, ‘Caballero, this is a Kentucky Fried Chicken, not a bakery,’ ” joked general manager Claudia Bovea, an employee of Yagoda’s for 35 years who remains in charge of the Hialeah store.
But all is not lost for flan lovers.
Bovea said her new bosses have told her she can continue making the flan — if she ever has enough staff and can stock the necessary ingredients. Making the flan is a 6-8 hour process, she said, and the only person on staff who knows how to make it — Turcios — has to dedicate a full day to it.
“I just don’t have the employees to free him up for a full day,” she said. “I need him frying chicken.”
For now, the flan is another casualty of the supply chain. But maybe not a permanent one.
“If all those things come together, I can start making the flan again,” she said. “I have hope.”
This story was originally published February 22, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
