Why is Chick-fil-A so good?
Let's think about it.
I had some Chick-fil-A this week and as ever I was suitably impressed with just how good it was. It’s odd how good Chick-fil-A is. I don’t want to make the claim that it’s great. It’s not. It’s fast food. Like any mass-produced commodity food, it can rise only to a level that is still considerably inferior to even average home cooking. It uses commodity meat and its buns are full of weird preservatives. Its tastiness is ultimately sort of one-note, kind of a low-grade umami that’s really just right but still more or less monotone. It’s not great. But as far as fast food goes it is undoubtedly the best thing on the crowded market.
Because we are a late-stage capitalist society, people love to debate this sort of thing—which fast food is the best, the subtle qualities of each chain, etc. We’ve taken care of everything else and now we can just revel in the arcana of abundance. And weirdly, lots of people really seem to hate Chick-fil-A. People can really get rankled talking about it. ”Sorry, but Chick-fil-A is really awful. People love it but it just sucks.” This seems just so silly to me. It’s obviously good. For what it is, it’s nearly perfect. Sometimes people just have to hate on something.
But why is it so good? What makes it such a good restaurant? I’ve realized it’s a comprehensive sort of thing. The Chick-fil-A experience is a total one. I want to break it down for you here. But before I do that I should note that I am not being sponsored or paid by Chick-fil-A for this post. I have no desire to be paid by them and I would have no hope of being paid by them even if I did desire it. Not a chance. This is a Substack that regularly declares that transgender people are mentally ill and that advocates the extrajudicial destruction of every smartphone on the planet. I think we should pay $9 per pound for beef only grown within 100 miles of our homes, and I think modern education is essentially a prison scheme for children. Heck I just spent an entire paragraph talking about why Chick-fil-A’s food is not great. Do you think this corporation would want this lunatic publication on any payroll of theirs? It would be a P.R. nightmare beyond their wildest nightmares. Radioactive beyond all belief.
With that said, here is what I think tends to make Chick-fil-A the best among the otherwise-low stations of American fast food:
The restaurant itself. Chick-fil-As are overwhelmingly exceptionally clean, well-lit, well-stocked. Fast-food joints tend to be pretty chaotic, messy places, often filled with random puddles of mop water, hideous bathrooms, greasy tables, ketchup-splattered condiment bars. The Onion wrote one of its greatest articles ever about this phenomenon: “Downtown McDonald's Perpetually A Hairsbreadth From Complete Anarchy.” But I guess the Chick-fil-A corporate mandate requires them to wipe down every surface of every restaurant every nine minutes because these places tend to be just really gleaming. It really does make a difference. A disorderly, unkempt fast food joint is an unsettling experience; it’s as if a herd of cackling hyenas just ran through, flinging bits of blood and flesh all over the place as they shrieked with horrific laughter. There’s just something about it that’s wrong, and you feel it in your bones. A clean environment, in contrast, sets you at your ease and makes you feel more relaxed.
The staff. For years people liked to mock Chick-fil-A’s staff, mostly because they had to say “my pleasure” every time you reflexively said “thank you.” They seemed like a bunch of nerds. And honestly, beyond that, there was a long time when the staff was pretty much indistinguishable from other fast-food joints: Mostly grumpy teenagers and silent middle-aged workers, all of them with that vacant look in their eyes that indicated they had enough shame to be embarrassed to work at a fast-food restaurant but not enough ambition to try and find anything better. Again, something must have come down from corporate, because staff at Chick-fil-A these days, they’re great. It’s good folks. It’s rare to have an interaction with a staffer that’s not at least modestly pleasant. They smile a lot, they’re nice, they’ll joke with you and/or laugh at your jokes. I don’t know what kind of instructional videotape they play for these people during orientation, but it sticks. They’ve even instructed them to say “my pleasure” more realistically these days so that you actually kinda believe it. It doesn’t sound like it used to, all surly and awkward, “muhplejur.” It sounds like it really and truly is their pleasure.
The chicken. It’s good chicken. Again, to be sure, it’s commodity stuff. It comes from those massive farms where chickens are kept in hot, stuffy, unhealthy broiler houses for their whole lives. These chickens are bio-engineered to grow a ton of breast meat very quickly, with the result that it’s a distinctly flavorless meat, free of the really unique and appealing taste of historically real chicken. Still, they season it very well. They brine it in something. There’s some speculation about this but I think it’s pickle juice. It’s very juicy and tender and has a great undertone of acidity. It’s fried in peanut oil, which if you know your seed oils is really a cut above the trash oils they use in pretty much every other fast food restaurant. Canola, sunflower, cottonseed oil—these really are quite literally trash products that some enterprising egghead figured out how to turn into disgusting rancid frying oil for fast food consumption. You can honestly taste the difference when it’s peanut oil.
The bun. This is a good bun. All caveats about fast food still apply here. But it’s good. It’s brioche, I think, or its mass-produced equivalent. It’s soft and squishy. They put the butter on top when they cook it, and then after it comes out of the oven, so it’s glossy and everything. I don’t know if they steam these buns in some way, or if the heat from the fried chicken chunk kind of steams it inside the foil-laminated bag, but either way it seems like it’s been subject to steam of some kind so it’s kind of slightly moist. It seems weird that that would be good, but it is.
The efficiency. Chick-fil-A runs its restaurants like a Model T assembly line. Everything is incredibly fast and efficient. This is true inside the restaurant; it is doubly true in the drive-through. Chick-fil-A is the only known restaurant in the history of the world at which it is faster to go through the drive-through than to go inside. The ancient Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi (429-500 AD) determined after decades of study that it’s impossible for the drive-through to be faster than the lobby. But Chick-fil-A has done it. You can roll up to Chick-fil-A with the drive-through ten cars deep and you’ll be out of there in ten minutes, tops. Try doing that at a Hardee’s, where a three-car line means you’ll be there for literally nine hours. Just amazing stuff.
The experience itself. Going to Chick-fil-A really is an experience in and of itself. Isn’t it? Part of it is just that the food is good and you’re hyped up to be eating it. But there’s something else here, a je ne sais quoi that it’s hard to nail down. Maybe it’s the fact that you tend to have to drive a decent distance to get to one. Nobody actually lives near a Chick-fil-A. It used to be that you had to go to a mall to have Chick-fil-A, you could only find them in mall food courts; nowadays they’re easier to find but still rare enough to be notable. Maybe it’s the fact that they’re only open six days a week. Think about it: One-seventh of your life, Chick-fil-A is not available to you. That’s unheard of for fast food. It makes the other 6/7ths of your life a little more notable.
I hope this helps you enjoy your next meal at Chick-fil-A with a little more awareness and appreciation. I mean, don’t make that big a deal out of it. It’s still just fast food. But this should at least give you something to ponder as you wait for your food. I’m glad I could help.