Inconvenient for your convenience
There’s a huge rift between bad (or even ok) fried chicken and the best-fried chicken out there. Like most people, you probably grew up on a diet of supermarket own-brand, oven-baked tenders after school or had your first taste of fried gold at a local chicken shop post-pub, sometime after your 18th birthday. Both are certainly not the best entry points into a world of crispy fried goodness. Everything hot and greasy tastes great when you’re stumbling home after a sesh, right? I bet you’ve never made the decision to go back to your favourite post-pub takeaway spot when sober.
Ultimately, it’s an unfortunate fact that most fried chicken that’s widely available is subpar. But it’s this bottom-shelf standard that most people get hooked on from an early age and becomes the benchmark throughout early life. That’s why people think that the Colonel makes good fried chicken. Because if you compare it to what you’ve grown up with, it sadly is in comparison.
But is it the best? No way!
The difference isn’t always the use of certain or even substantially better ingredients. In fact, they’re almost certainly much the same. The difference is much more emotional than that. It’s love. It’s attention to detail and care for what you do. It’s taking the extra steps and going the extra mile, despite the inconvenience to produce a much better product. As the old saying goes, “It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it that matters”, is never more true when talking about food and fried chicken in particular.
It’s that extra time and patience to get it right whatever it takes that is always going to win over the hungry diners' tastebuds and stomachs. So it only feels right that what you eat has been given its chance to sing on the way down. As weird as it sounds, you can taste that love too. You might not be able to put your finger on the difference to begin with and you can be forgiven for that.
It’s easy to forget a back story when you take for granted the convenience that you feel as a customer. Of being able to walk into a restaurant or jump online and within the time it takes you to drink a pint, receive something that has had days (you could argue years) of love put into it. The assumption is almost always that the chef has spent 10-15 minutes crafting something delicious, but for us that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Those mere minutes of cooking are the final stages of a long process. A time when our chefs are challenged to “do it justice” in an attempt to signify the seriousness of not screwing up the last all-important bit.
It all starts the day before that piece of fried chicken enters your mouth. The journey from “just another chicken breast” to the outrageous piece of golden fried joy that ends up between two buns is a 24 - 36 hour process. There are all kinds of antics involving buttermilk, salts, time, spices, flours, years of experience, and patience.
Fuck me, that’s all pretty inconvenient, right? A financial analyst might say “Can we quicken that up and streamline the recipe to make it cheaper? Who in their right mind would go to those lengths for 3 minutes of joy?”.
But I’d always argue, why wouldn’t you?
Because yes, the ingredients are all relatively similar to your late-night greasy spots and it takes the same length of time to eat it. But the enjoyment factor, the absolute craving to have more of it and the need to shout about it to all your mates comes from all of those inconvenient steps that we’ve taken to ensure that each mouthful gets the reaction it deserves.
The hours of development. The kicks up the arse from disgruntled customers or the minute tweaks to recipes over time all add up to a much better product in the long term. If you can make the product better by 1% a day, you’ll have a substantially better piece of fried chicken in your hands by the end of the year. But if you can tweak each of the many processes that make up the finished product by 1% a day, the product growth is exponential and the results at the end of the year are outstanding. Just because it’s great today, doesn’t mean it can’t be fucking incredible by this time next year. And love for what you do and not compromising the inconvenience for the sake of a much better product will always ensure that.