JeffB wrote: I have a cute Popeye's story.
Maybe three winters ago (2002?), on a calm, moonlit January night, I ventured forth to the local Popeye's. The big tires on my metrosexy SUV crunched the virgin snow on Ashland as I pulled into the lot across from Lakeview High School, hard by the Long Room.
One car idled ahead of me at the drive-thru window, its steamy exhaust mingling with the aroma of biscuits and battered fries. I put the truck in park and waited, inhaling the spicy, greasy Popeyes fumes that lingered lazily between the snow and the crisp night air. The beams of my headlights sliced through the purple darkness, stopping at a dumpster and carving sharp shadows on the Long Room wall.
Movement. WAYANG KULIT: The Ancient Shadow Plays of Bali. Rats. A silent shuffling theatre along the dumpster's front edge. Ten wide, the line of vermin gleefully circulated thighs and breasts, wings and drumsticks. A feast of El Greco caricature was painted in shadows on the Long Room wall.
Stumbling onto an old trick (used by Murnau, fascist propagandists, and Disney) the rodents' Walpurgis Night was projected, large and distorted, for all to see. Three-foot rat-shadows with oversized teeth and claws hunched over the drive-thru.
I could see the lady in front of me waiting and watching, her head on a swivel. Chicken and biscuits / infestation and death. A bag of spicy cajun chicken was thrust out the drive-thru window into the night. Hesitant, a hand slowly reached out, accepted sustenance.
I drove on.
I will eat Popeye's again, and I sometimes do. Just not there.
Phhhhtttt. 
Sometimes, I think people visit a venue they know they will not like, in order to get some context (and click bait) for their weblog | social media.
There will be no way they will receive a satifying experience. This jaunt is to absorb all the negative happenings they have experienced anywhere else in the past ## months. All their bile will spew forth on their description of this meal.
Sadly, this is still effective. There will be any number of people who will pile on on his tale of woe from visiting this fast-service outlet, a number of whom have a connection to a competing higher-priced restaurant (which is seldom back-checked).
So - I managed to visit this specific Popeye's store just before a satisfying visit to the adjacent Long Room Tavern, where select craft beer 12-oz. cans are only $4 on Sunday, and you don't have to put up with gridiron on televisions (and gambling “fantasy football” persons).
I thought the Spicy Chicken sandwich was pretty good. I think the secret is the pickles included thereon. (Disclosure: When I order the Original Chicken sandwich from Burger King®, for which I typically have a coupon, I ask for extra pickles upon it, which Burger King is very used to doing.)
Here are images of the sandwich. (N.B.2: That imagehost was O.K., but the entire W-WW site went off-line less than three weeks later.
Let's try another imagehost.)
Last edited by
pudgym29 on December 30th, 2019, 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.