Sounds too good to be true. Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits is launching three new $1.49 items on its menu including this one - a cheddar cheese-flavored tortilla wrap filled with fried chicken tenders and red beans and rice. Hot sauce served on the side. Anyone who has tried to juggle chowing down on one of Popyeyes crisp, spicy chicken wings and spooning up a mouthful of its sublime, smoky red beans and rice while shifting in traffic has dreamed of a one-handed, all-in-one bite. Other items on the new menu are a sandwich dubbed a delta mini - fried chicken with delta sauce, (creamy and mildly spicy, with relish) on a toasted bun; and fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits, served with either hot sauce or honey. (Honey? Does anyone eat fried chicken with honey?)
Along with the additions to the menu is a new ad campaign dubbed “Louisiana Fast.” Playing on the "slow food" movement, an international trend to reconnect a fast-food noshing public with the goodness of mama’s home cooking, Popeyes is focusing on its 12-hour marinade process and hand battering to authenticate its Louisiana black pot roots. Look for a new logo as well. The redesign is part of a rebranding of the company founded by the late New Orleans entrepreneur Al Copeland in 1971.
Originally named Popeyes Mighty Good Fried Chicken, after Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s character in the film The French Connection, Copeland’s New Orleans chicken restaurant grew to a chain of more than 800 stores. Copeland expanded into a casual Cajun-inspired line of restaurant’s called Copeland’s, as well as a spice label and cheesecake business. After buying the Church’s Fried Chicken chain in 1989, the company went into debt and filed for bankruptcy in 1991. Popeyes is currently owned by AFC enterprises out of Atlanta.
So is Popeyes slow food or fast food? It’s an interesting question in the debate on how to eat well in a face-paced society. While I am on a personal mission to find the holy grail of fried chicken, a place where it is still shallow fried in a black iron skillet by someone who turns up his or her nose at the ubiquitous deep fat fryer, Popeyes is the best commercial fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. Ditto for its red beans and rice. Sometimes it’s best just to trust your taste buds and believe. The new menu launches this week at Popeyes Fried Chicken restaurants across Acadiana.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
Subscribe to this comment's feed