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The Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is Here to Save America

One day in 2017, during the brunch rush at Sweet Dixie Kitchen—a small Southern California restaurant that the Orange County Register once dubbed “Long Beach’s Church of Southern Breakfast”—a customer was astonished to see a member of the restaurant’s staff duck into the kitchen bearing two large orders of Popeyes fried chicken. “I wanted to believe that this was just a snack for the workers, but alas it was not,” the patron, who goes by Tyler H. on Yelp, wrote, in an account of the meal. The chicken was, instead, destined for plates of the restaurant’s thirteen-dollar entrée of chicken and waffles. When Tyler asked a server for more detail on how the dish was prepared, his suspicions were confirmed: the restaurant readily owned up to outsourcing its chicken-frying to the national chain. Kim Sanchez, the owner of Sweet Dixie Kitchen—who happened to be the Popeyes smuggler Tyler had spotted—doubled down on her decision in a response appended to Tyler’s Yelp post. “We PROUDLY SERVE Popeyes spicy tenders,” she wrote, noting that her culinary philosophy is all about sourcing ingredients from the best purveyors, whether it’s tracking down jam from an artisan in Alabama, finding fresh vegetables at the farmer’s market, or placing a takeout order for America’s best fast-food fried chicken.

After a modest media firestorm and a tsunami of jubilant consumer outrage (including, inevitably, a new Twitter hashtag, #popeyesgate), Sweet Dixie Kitchen took its Popeyes chicken off the menu, and for the past couple of years the restaurant has more or less chugged along without. That is, until earlier this month, when, for two full days, it was the only place in the world a person could get Popeyes’ newest menu item, a fried-chicken sandwich. This time, at least, the chicken was served with permission: the fast-food brand partnered with Sanchez, capitalizing on the compelling oddness of #popeyesgate. At Popeyes locations in Orange County, stores hung posters in the windows that read “Chicken Sandwich not available here, yet” and directed impatient sandwich-seekers to Sweet Dixie Kitchen. Sanchez herself starred in a peppy advertisement for the sandwich, in which she chats about her previous brush with notoriety and crouches to add the trademark symbol to a Popeyes logo drawn on the restaurant’s outdoor chalkboard.

During the throes of #popeyesgate, I found myself surprisingly sympathetic to Sanchez’s position. It’s not that I was onboard with the idea of buying one restaurant’s food to sell at another, or marking up a four-dollar combo some three hundred per cent on the secondary market merely by putting it on a stoneware plate and throwing in a waffle. 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.