Abomination spat zip#

I do not brag about awards that much, not now that I am old and no one who knows me even cares, but I am the winner of the coveted James Beard Award, which makes me a blue ribbon-wearing, bona fide expert on the preparation of food. The Colonel is not with us anymore, and it’s probably a good thing he left this world before he even suspected that, someday, his beloved chicken restaurants-I mean, the man used to drive around to his restaurants to taste-test the gravy-would someday share a building with fast-food burritos. So, I go see the Colonel, or drive through at Popeye’s, or another fast-food option. Coleslaw should not take to the highway.īut, they sell it. The rule-if I was king I would make it an edict-for coleslaw should be that it should never be anywhere near a truck. Cabbage, unless pickled, does not respond to the passing of weeks. The option is the mass-produced, trucked-in slaw that you can buy in a vacuum-sealed plastic tub. Some do not even have slaw prepared in-house. It ranges from mightily shriveled to Spanish moss to, “Oh, Sweet Lord.” People there try to fool us by making slaw out of broccoli, or apples, or other unnatural things, but there is just something in the chemical properties of cabbage that does not respond to being encased in a counter next to some dessicated teriyaki chicken wings. I don’t know what happens to slaw in a deli case but it ain’t nothin’ good. The slaw, even in your high-end supermarkets, appears to have suffered greatly from time. The coleslaw in the deli counter even looks like something that does not approximate food. Specifically, the coleslaw will not taste like anything approximating food. The flaw is that, while the chicken (though perhaps old as Abraham) might taste fine, the condiments will not. The chicken is often fine, though I am still fairly certain that several hours under a heat lamp has never done fried chicken any good.īut that’s not the big flaw with supermarket chicken. I do not usually do deli-fried chicken because of the fatal flaw in the supermarket fried chicken apparatus. I am enough of a snob to say this is not often a good idea, but I was hungry.

Abomination spat zip#

Snobs, the ones who think fried chicken should be honey-drizzled or beheaded when it’s not looking, will tell you about this great little place in Soho… We will ignore them because they are … well, we will ignore them because I say so.Īnyway, I needed some chicken, and Gus’s was nowhere close, and no one-at least no one who was speaking to me in my rough zip code-was going to fry me any, so that meant fast food or supermarket delis. I believe Gus’s fried chicken, from the one on Front Street in Memphis, is the best chicken in the known world. I had not had any good chicken in a while I hadn’t even had any bad chicken. I had a fried chicken craving going pretty strong.

It was a year or so back, when I had enough. I don’t think we, as a Southern society, should have to live with this abomination. What if I really had gone crazy, from wilted cabbage and tainted mayonnaise?