Popeye's fried chicken, biscuits, and fries, with Tupelo honey. See, it isn't all sous vide and hours in the kitchen. Sometimes dinner is as easy as ten minutes in a dirty Mission Popeye's full of crack heads.

I had to stand around and wait for my order for ten minutes or so because they were out of fries. It was 7:30pm and they were out of fries. Probably every time I've been to a Popeye's, they've been out of something. In contrast to McDonald's , which is usually very well-run, Popeye's is universally terribly managed. This remained the same when I moved from the East coast to the West. Badly managed Popeye's is a little slice of home.

While I was waiting for my order, they were cleaning out the big metal racks in which they keep their chicken. Basically, the chicken sits in a pile on a wire rack, which in turn sits on a flat metal ledge. When they clean that ledge, they move the wire racks full of chicken to the side, and then use a bench scraper to round up all the bits of fried skin that have crumbled off during the day. They must have scooped up about a gallon of super crispy somewhat-crumbled fried chicken skin. I asked whether they might sell me a bucket of just these scrap chicken skin pieces they were going to throw out. I wanted to use them as an ingredient in, for instance, chicken skin croquant type things. The girl helping me, who was eating leftover takeout Chinese at the register, said I'd have to talk to the manager about that. "Where is the manager?" "I don't know." "Is he here?" "I don't know." Ah, well... there's your problem.

Nevertheless, great chicken. Hit-and-miss biscuits, weird and mediocre fries, terrible faux-Cajun sides. But great fried chicken.

Posted by Barzelay on 2009/01/15 @ 23:02 | Comments (2) |

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