The Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is Here to Save America

[dalton99a]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/the-popeyes-chicken-sandwich-is-here-to-save-america

The Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is Here to Save America
By Helen Rosner
August 20, 2019


Together, the elements of the Popeyes chicken sandwich are so perfectly balanced that they meld into one another to form a new, entirely coherent whole. Photograph Courtesy Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen

... But it was hard for me to find fault with Sanchez’s underlying aesthetic principle: Popeyes fried chicken is fantastic. The meat is flavorful and juicy, encased in a spiky, golden sea urchin of batter—surprisingly light, uncommonly crispy. Fried chicken is one of the world’s great culinary syntheses, found in cultures and kitchens on every patch of the planet: bird, flour, fat. American fried chicken, whose recipe was cultivated by enslaved Africans in the South, is, at its best, a food of transcendent deliciousness, an object of near holiness. There is almost certainly better fried chicken in the world than the version found at Popeyes, but only marginally so—and, in most of the forty-nine states where Popeyes locations can be found, it’s unlikely that whatever’s better is more convenient or reliable. If you were going to try to pass off another restaurant’s fried chicken as your own, and you had a Popeyes nearby—well, you could do a whole lot worse.

The chicken sandwich that Sweet Dixie Kitchen served for that two-day tease is, as of last week, available at all 3,102 Popeyes locations in the United States. There are dozens of fast-food chains in America, débuting hundreds of new menu items each year. Of these, maybe two or three in a generation make significant inroads into our collective culinary consciousness: a McRib here, an Impossible Whopper there. Perhaps the stunt with Sweet Dixie Kitchen wasn’t even necessary: the Popeyes chicken sandwich has ascended to the pantheon in record time, not because of a catchy ad campaign or an irresistible pricing scheme but because it is, if Twitter, Instagram, and uncountable blog posts and off-the-cuff reviews are to be believed, the best goddam chicken sandwich in the world. For the past few days, my social-media feeds—which, most of the time, read like bleak, polyphonic litanies of the falling-apart world—have been overwhelmed instead by discourse about the sandwich. I’ve watched friends and strangers go through the stages of enlightenment: skepticism, curiosity, anticipation, capitulation, ecstasy. It was, specifically, the ecstasy of Nia-Raquelle Smith, a scholar and food writer in Brooklyn, that pushed me out the door and into my nearest Popeyes. “That Popeyes sandwich had me in my feelings. That’s probably the most emotion I’ve shown all year,” she tweeted, and went on to enumerate its additional virtues: “The chicken is perfectly fried! The breading isn’t falling off. You get crunch in every bite!” The bun is “a buttery cushion”; the sauce “takes it over the top. Is it healthy? NO! But dammit don’t it taste good. It’s truly a gift from the heavens.”

Like Popeyes fried chicken, the chicken sandwich comes in two versions, classic and spicy, both of which are beautifully simple. They both arrive in a foil-lined bag (the better to keep the sandwich piping hot, its optimal eating temperature). They both have the same bun—as Smith promised, it’s buttery and sweet and light. They have the same pickles, sizable rounds of cucumber crisp with vinegar. They have the same exquisite slab of chicken breast, hefty and juicy and snow-white, in its crenellated armor of that uncommonly crisp fried batter. There’s regular mayonnaise on the classic; on the spicy sandwich, which to my mind is slightly better, the mayonnaise is spiked with cayenne. Both sandwiches stick the landing on the most important element of a fast-food sandwich: the fusion of its distinct components into an ineffable, irresistible gestalt. The salt, the fat, the sharpness, the softness—together, they’re what flavor scientists might describe as “high amplitude,” a combination so intense, and so perfectly balanced, that they meld into one another to form a new, entirely coherent whole.

This is not, as some outlets have reported, the first fried-chicken sandwich to appear on the Popeyes menu. Its chicken po’ boy, a New Orleans-inspired offering of chicken tenders dressed with pickles, lettuce, and mayonnaise on an oblong French-style roll, was introduced nationally in 2003. But it has since been discontinued, and the new sandwich has eclipsed its memory already, giving Popeyes its first serious challenge to the chicken-on-a-bun hegemony of Chick-fil-A. For some diners, put off by Chick-fil-A’s right-leaning corporate politics and widely known funding of anti-gay activism, Popeyes appeals as a chicken sandwich with less overt moral compromise. (The Advocate, the L.G.B.T.-interest magazine, ran a story about the sandwich under the headline “More Flavor, Less Homophobia.”) The brands, as is their wont these days, took the battle to Twitter: Chick-fil-A protested, oddly, that its version equals “love”; in response, Popeyes asked Chick-fil-A, “...y’all good?” Wendy’s, whose spicy-chicken sandwich really is pretty great, especially if you order it with extra pickles, jumped into the fray to assert its own poultry dominance. The rest of us can watch the mega-chains spar, jockeying for the love of some abstract ideal of a sarcastic Gen Z-er, or whoever it is they think they’re performing for.

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https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/08/21/a-maryland-man-is-selling-the-new-popeyes-fried-chicken-sandwich-for-100/
A Maryland Man Is Selling the New Popeyes Fried Chicken Sandwich for $100
Plus a $38.52 delivery fee within the DC area.
Written by Kalina Newman
| Published on August 21, 2019

https://www.lamag.com/digestblog/la-popeyes-locations/
Some L.A. Popeyes Are Reportedly Selling Out of Chicken Sandwiches
People are hitting up multiple locations to get a taste of the hyped-up new menu item
By Zoie Matthew -
August 21, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/popeyes-chicken-sandwich-twitter.html
A Popeyes Chicken Sandwich and a Tactic to Set Off a Twitter Roar
“Look at how much attention they’re getting — it’s impressive,” the executive editor of a trade magazine said.
By David Yaffe-Bellany
Aug. 21, 2019
Updated 6:35 p.m. ET

[GusBob]

1. Wait! They 86'd the Po'boy?

Nooooooo

[Sugar Smack]

2. 1. How much salt do you suppose is in that thing?

2. Is it realistic to hope trump discovers them?

[dalton99a]

3. No info yet

https://www.prevention.com/food-nutrition/a28771284/popeyes-chicken-sandwich-nutrition/

Popeyes chicken sandwich calories
A spokesperson for Popeyes did confirm to Prevention.com that their chicken sandwich contains 690 calories, but we unfortunately don’t have exact details on fat, sodium, fiber, or protein yet.

Perhaps Trump will see this on TV and demand to have a taste

[Sugar Smack]

8. This is what I'm hoping for.

[UTUSN]

4. BizInsider sez it's "premium" priced & a sign of economic good times!1

That other big sellers from times of yore were launched in periods of good economic times!1

[underpants]

5. Had another Impossible Whopper today. Pretty good

After an off site meeting a coworker wanted to try it.

I had had one last week but hey okay. I tried one of the $1 tacos. Horrible.
Also I ate French fries for the third time this year. They put them on my tray by mistake and I figured - Hey. Why not?

[underpants]

6. End of the article. This is some good writing here

The rest of us can watch the mega-chains spar, jockeying for the love of some abstract ideal of a sarcastic Gen Z-er, or whoever it is they think they’re performing for. But these things aren’t decided in memes—they’re decided in mouths.

[nolabear]

7. Thank goodness I can't easily get to a Popeye's!

I looooooooove Popeye’s, and I never, ever, ever eat fast food. Even in New Orleans it’s a favorite.

[Zorro]

9. Popeye's is about the only place one can (occasionally) buy fried chicken livers

I find them quite tasty.

[Blue_true]

10. Batter fried chicken is an African American innovation.

The first fried chicken was traced to Scotland, but it was seasoned and deep fried in grease without batter. Scottish immigrants brought the technique with then to America. African slaves, who had more skill seasoning food, developed a technique for breading chicken before deep frying it, the technique kept seasonings in the chicken and breading and made the fried chicken less stringy.

One food that people associate with African Americans actually truly is a worldwide food that did not have it's origin with African Americans, that food is stewed Oxtail. Oxtail stew has been done in many parts of Europe for centuries. African Americans made the stew a fine art, as they did with pig's feet, pig's tails, pig and beef ribs, all "discard" parts of the animals that American White did not eat because the meat was too tough or greasy, AA developed the slow-cooking techniques now associated with such food, to tenderize it and enrich it's flavor.

Personally, I prefer grilled chicken sandwiches. But I will certainly try the Popeye's sandwich once the craze dies down.