Inktober 19: #Plump
Let's talk about Chick-Fil-A
I’ve been eating at Chick-Fil-A for about fifty years. In the intervening decades, the menu has grown considerably. Now there’s a spicy Chick-Fil-A sandwich, and there’s a sandwich with lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. There are nuggets. There are grilled options and salads. But in my fifty years of Chick-Fil-A eating, I have only ever ordered the original sandwich*, with the fried #plump, boneless breast, the two pickles, and the buttery bun sweating in the foil pouch—the same sandwich I got in the mid-1970s from the Chick-Fil-A in the Houston Mall.
And here’s why: one day when my mama picked me up from kindergarten, she had Chick-Fil-A sandwiches waiting in the car. We went home and ate them, just the two of us. We didn’t eat out very often, and the specialness of having both a chicken sandwich and my mama all to myself, while my sisters were still at school, felt like getting away with something. Surely it was the greatest fast-food experience of my life. I can’t even think what the second-best experience might be.
So, sure, I have considered trying the spicy Chick-Fil-A sandwich, or even the grilled sandwich. But instead I choose the sandwich that takes me back to that little kitchen on Spruce Street and that meal with just my mama.
Bonus Chick-Fil-A adjacent anecdote: When my buddy Marvin was in medical school in Atlanta, he was so busy that his new wife Carla was feeling pretty lonely; eventually she put her foot down and said they absolutely had to make time for a date night. So on Friday night they put on nice clothes, and Marv drove his lovely young wife to the Dwarf House, the diner that was the precursor to Chick-Fil-A. Apparently that was his idea of a nice restaurant (and, in Marv’s defense, it’s nicer than a Chick-Fil-A, which is itself nicer than a lot of restaurants—at least the kind of restaurants that have billboards). Carla busted out crying in the Dwarf House parking lot.
*I’m not including breakfast. At breakfast I order the biscuit. Of course. I’m not a monster.