/dev/null/kevin

Chick-Fil-A is apparently credited with 'inventing' the breaded chicken fillet sandwich, or at least mass producing it. I never heard of it either until I was in Atlanta where the company was started. I really like their sandwich, and I don't think that the McDonald's one really compares to it. As far as the pickles go - who knows? It's the fact that it's a Chick-Fil-A ripoff that makes it southern!

Posted by JonD on June 10, 2008 at 07:23 PM PDT #

It's the way the chicken is spiced/breaded/pressure-cook-fried (the secret to the chick fil-a sandwich is the pressure cooking) that makes it Southern, and down here we put pickles on everything anyway. (our burgers come w/ mustard too which apparently is a thing here too)

Chick Fil-a sandwiches come dry -- the bun is lightly buttered and run through the toaster thing and then the "two crucial pickles" are added, the chicken, and it's put in it's foil packet. They're oooohh so good.

I usually pull the pickle slices off too. I made the mistake once when I was a kid of ordering them w/o pickles and it tasted not as good. That taught me a lesson.

In fact, my parents had a few of them waiting for me in the car when I got in this week and I'm not even in Georgia, but Texas!

here's a ny times article about it:
http://tinyurl.com/5g8f44

another thing they don't mention that makes me mad about chick fil-a (and I love them) is that they're crazy religious. I don't mean like In-n-out religious ie putting John 3:16 or Nahum 1:7 on the bottom of the medium cups) I mean full on "no dancing baptists" (like footloose). They aren't open on Sundays!

It was infuriating as a kid going to the mall w/ a fistfull of quarters, playing some games and thinking, oh, I'll go get a chick fil-a but nooooo those bastards weren't open. And in a mall- EVERYONE has to be open during the mall hours. They were (are) the only chain to get away with that. They even used to be at Terminal A25 in DFW and were still closed on Sundays!! WTF?!

So this is a nice rambling comment, so I'll leave you w/ one more story- when I came in to TX this week, my mom got mad because there was a huge white truck at the chick fil-a (that belongs to the franchise owner) with all kinds of Jesus talk all over it. My mom was all up in arms about that. "I hope you like those sandwiches because Jesus wants you to have them"

Posted by kenneth on June 10, 2008 at 08:33 PM PDT #

I grew up in Alabama and back in my meat-eating days (that was before I moved to California, obviously) I used to love Chick-Fil-A's sandwiches. I think the pickles are mandatory because as Kenneth points out, we put them on everything. But I think we put them on everything because our moms and aunts make jars and jars of them every year so we have to use them up somehow.

And now you've got me craving a Chick-Fil-A sandwich. I wonder how they taste with extra pickles and no chicken...

Posted by melanie gao on June 10, 2008 at 10:00 PM PDT #