#FastFoodFriday: Popeye’s Ho-Ho-Holiday Spiced Chicken: Stick To Fried Chicken

Loosen your seatbelts and your belt fellas. Cause today’s #FastFoodFriday…

And we’re ordering Popeye’s.

That’s right baby, #FriedChickenFridays are back.

Editor: But we’re not ordering fried chicken.

Wait. What?

Editor: Yea.

But Popeye’s is a fried chicken restaurant. Look, it even says here on Wikipedia.

Editor: Yeah, but they got this:

But Popeye’s isn’t a Roast Chicken restaurant. Even for the Japanese who eat KFC for Christmas, they order it fried and not roasted.

Editor: LALALA I can’t hear you you’re having roasted chicken for review.

My…my fried chicken…

Delivery

Now, we usually don’t talk about delivery unless it affects the experience. Having seen the promotional picture, ordering online were confusing times.

In the promo picture, you can clearly see the New Merry Berry Biscuit being featured. And of course, we’ll take notice. Popeye’s are famous for fried chicken AND biscuits.

Now, the problem: Biscuits aren’t for delivery. Check it yourself if you don’t believe me. The biscuits are not included in any of the set meals, and they don’t include drinks either.

What’s made it even more confusing is that brochures that were printed on paper asks you to go to popeyesdelivery.com.sg, but typing that in a browser gives you this:

And clicking on ORDER ONLINE in the main Popeye’s site brings you to Food Panda.

So this was basically my reaction when looking at the website, brochures, then to my food:

Menu choices for delivery also affected the food. More on that in the coming section.

The Food

The Personal Ho-Ho-Holiday Meal goes for S$11.90 online. Difference between this and the S$9.20 at the chains is that they replaced the biscuit and the drink with 2Pc Chicken Tenders. (Pieces rearranged a little for better presentation.)

A closer look at the spiced chicken:

For some reason, the chicken breast piece was a lot darker in colour. Me thinks they aren’t roasted quite evenly.

The mushroom sauce: Opening this made it obvious that this is just your typical F&B Western Stall supplier mushroom soup. It smells exactly like that.

Taste Test

The drumstick is juicy and all-around nicely roasted, with a slight kick thanks to the spices. But it’s hard to say that it’s anything special. All I could think about while eating it was that I’d rather have fried chicken.

And if I wanted cheap roast chicken, I’d probably buy one from NTUC or the nearest supermarket deli. Popeye’s spices are more flavourful than deli roast chicken, but I can’t say that the meat quality is much better.

Here is where the set kicks the chicken bucket for Christmas.

Chicken breast piece. Dry. I don’t know if this is an anomaly since the piece was visibly a lot darker than the drumstick, but the meat is for sure dry even for chicken breast.

Dunking it into the mushroom sauce didn’t help. The mushroom sauce is bad. It tasted more like MSG than mushrooms, and mushrooms are already rich in glutamate (that is, MSG).

Having tasted the various portions of the meal revealed one last thing: the delivery meals are terribly balanced in textures and flavours. I ended the meal with 3 cups of water because each portion of the meal made me more thirsty. It’s dry food after dry food.

The delivery set meal is in terrible need of a good sauce, a buttery biscuit and a drink. None of which the delivery menu provided.

But I guess, if its any consolation I won an ice cream for my next purchase.

Yay?

Rating (for delivery): 1/5

I can’t really know what score I’d give to the actual meal at the store without trying the biscuit, but I’d guess it to be a 2 to 2.5/5.

Stick to fried chicken, Popeye’s.