S-TIER RANKINGS: FRIED CHICKEN

This is subjective, except for the part where I am completely right about Cane's selling soggy bird meat shovels made for drinking spicy mayonnaise

NOTES:

S-TIER: SUBLIME, THE STANDARD, EVERYTHING ONE SHOULD AIM FOR IN FRIED CHICKEN ARCHITECTURE AND CONSTRUCTION

Popeyes

The mother road of fried chicken viaducts and byways, Popeyes remains the path all must tread to attain mass-market fried chicken enlightenment.

Available anywhere, because Popeyes’ location scouts sometimes slap up entire locations before opening doors and realizing another Popeyes has been open for fifteen years a half-mile away. Consistently incredible despite service so inconsistent it becomes its own form of consistency, and locations varying from “spotless new shrines to arteriosclerosis” to “only held together by fryer grease binding to the walls built entirely of black mold.” Craved despite Popeyes’ inability to calibrate proper mild/spicy output to the point where there is a commonly accepted Popeyes-branded unit of time: The Spicy Interval, aka the expected wait for fresh spicy chicken generally thought to be between ten or fifteen minutes.

No, you’re not getting an exact time. You don’t need one. Stop arguing. This is a matter of Popeyes’ law.

The secret to all this: Popeyes approaching fried chicken like they’re playing Deep Fryer Tycoon. The sliders for Popeyes in Deep Fryer Tycoon with a possible total of 300 points to spend in categories with a max spend of 100 would look something like this:

Ambiance: 0

Customer Service:3

Sides: 5 or 50 depends on the day, really

Deep Fryer: 100

Chicken quality: 100

Spices: 100

Total: over budget but this is Louisiana, we’ll fix that later when we cook the books in committee.

TL;DR: I once watched a whole fight break out between two men at a Popeyes and didn’t even move because I was waiting on my chicken. Neither did anyone else. It’s good enough to ignore a fistfight and that is one of the highest compliments I can pay anything, much less fried chicken.

A-TIER: GREATNESS

Gus’s Fried Chicken

Thirty locations now so I’m good with taking them fully out of the Single Serving Fried Chicken category. By the way, if you’re reading this and thinking “plebe, rube, peasant, you know nothing of this tiny miracle of a family restaurant that only serves twenty-three chickens every Thursday out of the back of a church in Thomasville, Georgia,” that’s cool. I’m sure your indie rock chicken place is great, but it’s in the Single Serving Fried Chicken category and will stay there.

The secret to Gus’s is that it’s fried in oil so hot it could liquefy a car engine, and served nearly torched to hell just seconds after being plucked from the smelter. If Gus’s could throw the chicken directly from the kitchen onto the plate without burning a straight line of customers with an infernal spray of three thousand degree unicorn oil, they would. The best fried chicken for pulling a Jake Elwood and eating whole installments of the bird.

Bonchon

Bonchon is a Korean fried chicken chain. It is twice-fried because Koreans loved fried chicken so much they decided to see what would happen if you did it twice as hard. Korea has used this exact same tactic with action movies, short track speed skating, dystopian films, and beer drinking. The results are titanic in every case including Bonchon’s chicken. I would rob you for some of it right now. I might be waiting at your door right now to try and rob you for some Bonchon. Be warned.

B-TIER: SIMPLY GOOD FRIED CHICKEN WHICH IS STILL TREMENDOUSLY SATSIFYING

Lee’s Famous Recipe

I really don’t know if Lee’s is this good, or even that good anymore since it’s changed hands a couple of times and might be a lingering, zombified shell of its former self. But the memory of the three times I’ve had it are enough of a data set for me to put it in the extremely delicious and respectable B-Tier automatically.

Krispy Krunchy Chicken

Brilliant by design alone because Krispy Krunchy survives by mutualism. If the gas station is the rhino, then the Krispy Krunchy is the little bird that survives by riding around on its back all day cleaning it off while dodging predators. The chicken can be variable but tends to stick between good and great. The sides come in quantities capable of gagging an ogre. Ooh! And finding one is its own treasure hunt through sometimes sketchy gas stations! The only good fried chicken brand that comes with its own quest. STRONG TOLKIEN FRIED CHICKEN VIBES. Krispy Krunchy bows to no man.

Publix

Consistent utility chicken is a must, a non-negotiable asset. Publix isn’t the best at anything fried chicken-wise, but it is the constant temptress wafting through the grocery store aisle on a Saturday whispering the sexiest words imaginable to someone who doesn’t want to cook on a weekend: you could just buy some chicken, baby. Reliable, sturdy fried bird that comes in an iconic cardboard log cabin with a little plastic window so you can wave at it in the passenger’s seat on the way home and give it the Jim Nantz before devouring half of it watching a noon Big Ten game. HELLO FRIENDS.

C TIER: PASSING, IS SOMETIMES VERY GOOD BUT ALWAYS SATISFYING

Church’s

The fried chicken hipster’s pick for reasons no one can quite discern. It’s good, it’s fine, and it’s usually located within a block or two of Popeyes with no waiting. This probably explains its small but loyal following more than anything else: Church’s is the place to get quality fast-food chicken without the wait and dada customer service of a Popeyes. (Okay maybe some dada customer service issues, no one’s perfect.)

Note: I’ve seen more Church’s locations that have suffered massive fires than any other fried chicken chain. This has to be a direct consequence of Church’s being the oiliest fried chicken this side of a Taiwanese street vendor’s batch. They are almost always replaced with a new Church’s looking exactly as dingy and old as the previous Church’s location. I have no idea how they accomplish this, but they do.

Bojangles

Bo’s loyalists will see them in the C-Tier and protest. But the Bo-Berry biscuits! The breakfast biscuits! The biscuits! No one from the Bojangles’ hive will ever defend the actual chicken, because the secret to Bojangles is that they are a biscuit restaurant with a poultry problem. It’s decent to good generally. But like most things from North Carolina, it’s highly touted and ultimately underspiced. HEY: Did you know that large swaths of North Carolina are just evil bland Virginia things in disguise? Heads on a swivel at all times, soldiers.

The biscuits, though!

Royal Farms

What gas station chicken should be: Cheap, available, and most importantly this: objectively good but situationally excellent. I’ve had it twice, and both times it made me say “I regret the way this made me feel, but enjoyed the path to feeling this way.” Solid as hell, like pretty much everything in the C-Tier.

D-TIER: I GUESS YOU HAD TO EAT IT

ZAXBY’S

Really just a chicken finger restaurant, or a salt restaurant sometimes distracted by frying chicken. Serves good salads, actually. Would be much higher on this list if labeled as a salad or a toast restaurant. Salt is not a reason to go to a restaurant, residents of Georgia whose taste buds have been destroyed by licking pesticide-soaked golf balls for decades on end.

E-TIER

KFC

Often comes out more like steamed chicken than fried chicken. Should not be called chicken as it might be 30% water and sawdust for all we know. Should not be called fried due to sogginess and lack of texture. The Kentucky can stay, as it is a proper descriptor of the chicken’s dodginess and lack of infrastructure.

EXCEPTION: KFC in China absolutely slaps for reasons I can’t begin to explain.

Chick-Fil-A

Really only putting this here so I don’t have to hear “WHAT ABOUT CHICK-FIL-A.” KFC at least serves fried chicken on the bone, something CFA is NOT pleased to do for you. The sandwich is iconic but ever since my kids pointed out the buns smell like feet I can’t eat them. Nuggets are flames, even if this isn’t a proper fried chicken restaurant.

F-TIER: NO

Cane’s

Fried chicken shouldn’t need sauce. Y’all keep paying for forks made of oily wet and decidedly uncrispy meat to scoop up spicy mayonnaise if you want, it’s a free country. Cane’s escapes complete condemnation by giving good money to the Southern University marching band, so I’m glad suckers’ money is going somewhere that will put it to proper use. TL;DR: Bad, bad fried chicken with excellent secondary results.