WHEN THE LINE at Dulan’s has inched along enough that I can gaze at the entire topography of the restaurant’s steam table — with its mountains of baked and fried chicken, bogs of greens and foothills of mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas — I’m looking first for the oxtails piled like boulders. They look sturdy, but the long-simmered knobs yield their pot-roast-rich meat at the slightest nudge. Perhaps requesting rice underneath would be wisest for capturing their gravy; I’m far too attached to sides of vinegared collards and mac and cheese. The recipe for the fried chicken, all righteous crunch and saline juice, traces the lineage of Adolf Dulan, who ran the legendary Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in Marina del Rey before opening the first Dulan’s in 1999. He moved to Los Angeles from Oklahoma as part of the second wave of the African American Great Migration. Adolf Dulan died in 2017, but the Dulan family honors his culinary legacy. This food is integral to the soul of Los Angeles.

• 202 E. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood, (310) 671-3345; 1714 W. Century Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 418-8527; dulans-sfk.com