Popeyes Famous Louisiana Chicken opened its first New Zealand outlet in late April but is it worth the hype?
July 6 is Fried Chicken Day. Kim Knight asks the big, but not necessarily serious, questions about the newest chapter in New Zealand’s fried chicken story.
Journalism takes you places you’ve never been. For example, Takanini. Where is Takanini?
“South?” said Dan Ahwa gesturing, vaguely.
I could tell Viva’s creative director didn’t have the faintest, but his suit pants, suit jacket and a spiffy knitted vest made him look like a man going places. One of those places might as well be Takanini.
Four little words: “Starting. Route. To. Popeyes.”
July 6 is Fried Chicken Day. It was actually June when we left the office, but fried chicken takes a really long time to digest. Also, our boss was momentarily out of the country and unable to say “no” to this story idea.
To summarise the plot so far: “Popeyes - what’s the fuss?”
Alternate versions of this precis might include “Why I made a one-hour round trip for lunch” and/or “Is there anything I won’t do for a side of macaroni cheese?” and/or “Don’t ask me why there is no apostrophe in Popeyes”.
Popeyes Famous Louisiana Chicken opened its first New Zealand outlet in late April. According to reports at the time, Auckland’s Great South Rd was brought to a standstill as people queued for hours and camped overnight to be the first to taste chicken from the American chain that was founded in New Orleans in 1972 - one year after this country’s fried chicken story began in earnest.
Brief histories of fried chicken in New Zealand inevitably begin in 1971, and the opening of the first KFC in Auckland’s Royal Oak. In fact, “Kentucky Fried Chicken” has been on the menu since at least 1908, when it appeared in Wellington newspaper column, alongside Yankee Puffs and Brooklyn Pudding (cooks were advised to “clean and disjoint the chicken at least 12 hours before use”). Meanwhile, in perhaps the country’s earliest example of the Scandi-chic(k) aesthetic, a Wanganui shopkeeper called A.C Lennard was, in 1907, advertising takeaway meatballs and “Fried Norwegian Chicken”.
Some dishes are not made to be homemade.
Fried chicken, for example, requires more boiling oil than the defence of a medieval rampart, the coating always burns before the meat cooks and your house will smell like 2am car interior for weeks.
There will always be a place in my hungover heart for KFC served with potato, gravy and coleslaw but our horizons have broadened since tubby little Hugo said “you go” in possibly the most misguided television commercial ever produced (sample, and patently untrue, lyric: “In the back seat we sat getting thinner . . . “).
In 2024, fried chicken has more genres than the library. Popeyes is the latest chapter in a story that might include Auckland’s Pocha (almond coating), Onslow (topped with caviar) or Katsu Katsu (justifies the repetition). Go to Peaches Hot Chicken for the holy cluck, Lowbrow for the free range wings and Ockhee for the sticky goodness of dak gang jeong. The list is long but, according to the GPS, we’re one left hand turn away from Popeyes Famous Louisiana Chicken.
This is the chicken that has, famously, been served at Beyonce and Jay Z’s wedding, Floyd Mayweather’s birthday party, and a Met Gala after party. Honestly? I was expecting something . . . else.
What would inspire a human to drive 25 kilometres down the southern motorway for chainstore chicken?
American research psychologist Paul Rozin calls it the “omnivore’s dilemma”. In brief, we are not koalas who just eat eucalyptus. The human animal is constantly compelled to seek the new and novel. We can (and do) eat anything and some of it can (and does) kill us.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues our appetites are an indicator of social hierarchy. The rarer the experience, the more highbrow its consumer becomes. At the time of writing, there is just one Popeyes Famous Louisiana store in the country. We were not making a one-hour return trip for chicken and cajun chips; we were significantly enhancing our social status.
Did everybody get this menu? Tuesday lunchtime and Popeyes is clad in a horrifying amount of high-vis orange. The colour scheme looks more Vehicle Testing Centre than Temple of Good Taste.
I do wonder if Dan Ahwa is over dressed but, as my colleague Greg Bruce once noted, Dan is the fashion tzar of Auckland. I keep my opinions to myself and, like magic, the queues part. Dan strides, suited and purposefully, to the stylish touch screens, where we order one of everything just in case we are never allowed out of the office again.
“Is Fried Chicken Day an international thing?” my editor asks, suspiciously, some weeks later. “The world is a global village,” I reply, fully confident that nobody who orders a Popeyes biscuit will be surprised when they receive a scone.
Place your order, pay your money, take your buzzer and collect your very large bag of cultural cachet.
Dan has spent the waiting time googling Popeyes orange. He reports that it sits at the extreme end of the hex colour code, a system devised to ensure standardised computer screen graphic displays.
“Sorry,” he says, “That was really dorky.”
But also: “The extremeness makes me think about how extreme the food is. The artificialness. Almost like if you had pulled the meal directly from an episode of The Simpsons . . . "
He wonders whether moving the chicken to somewhere “more chill - say, a park” would change its flavour. Popeyes, says Dan, is quite a high-octane place to eat.
“There’s a lot going on, combined with that orange, which is just constantly in your face.”
I too have been reflecting on our journey so far. I imagine it with a seminal new wave sound track:
“You may ask yourself, ‘Where does that highway go to?’
“And you may ask yourself, ‘Am I right, am I wrong?’
“And you may say to yourself, ‘MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?”
To summarise the plot so far, I had to have the macaroni cheese but did you ever stick dried pasta elbows on an empty tin can and spray paint the whole thing silver before presenting it to your dad as a Father’s Day pen holder? That pen holder was, arguably, cheesier than this Mac n Cheese.
The chicken tenders were so tender I wondered if they were real. (Of course they are). I ordered the Cajun fries to dip into the Cajun gravy and swear I tasted celery (one of the trinity vegetables of Cajun cuisine). I bit into the signature chicken to test the famous “shatter-crunch” and definitely had to wipe a lot of shatter off the table when I’d finished.
We’d come a long way to answer a simple question: Would we do this again? To our left, Hamilton. And, across six lanes of bumper-to-bumper motorway traffic, the right hand turn back to Auckland. “There are a lot of seagulls,” Dan observes. We sit and wait and watch birds circling overhead. I hope we make it back to the office in time to file for Fried Chicken Day.
Kim Knight is an award-winning lifestyle journalist with a master’s degree in gastronomy.
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