On New Year’s Eve (Tuesday, December 31) I found myself in Leicester doing interviews and I was also asked to find a food place to review. I end up at Popeye’s Louisiana Chicken, which opened a few years ago in the old Dorothy Perkins store on Gallowtree Gate.
Inside it was very quiet, like the city centre itself on a cold Tuesday morning between Christmas and New Year. It wasn’t even 11.30am, so hardly Fried Chicken O’clock by anybody’s standards but I had plans for a big dinner later so an early lunch seemed like a good idea.
I opted for a Large Louisiana Barbecue Box Meal with a latte and a sage and onion hash brown as an extra, which came to £14.49 in total.
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The burger was big and tempting. There was a giant chunk of chicken in a bun with sauce and cheese – no messing around with salad or other distractions.
And the burger was great to eat. There was a lot of crunch from the coating on the chicken, the ratios were all good and the bun held together nicely, which is very important to me.
Hidden inside the burger, the meat tasted fine
(Image: Tom Mack/Leicester Mercury)
Considering it was only three hours since breakfast and I wasn’t really hungry, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed what was, by today’s standards, a pretty reasonably-priced burger. The sage and onion hash brown was tasty, if a bit soggy, and the chips – I splashed out an extra 75p for Cajun fries – had a great depth of flavour.
So far, so good. And the restaurant had a nice vibe, with big screens showing scenes from New Orleans and some James Brown track audible but not too loud.
As well as the burger, chips and hash brown, the order included a chicken breast on the bone, deep fried in the same crunchy stuff as the piece in the burger.
It’s nice that Popeye’s think their chicken is good enough to serve on its own, with no bread, cheese and sauce to hide behind. But I think it was a mistake.
For me, common failings for a piece of chicken include meat that’s too dry and an exterior marred by too much grease. And neither of those were issues at Popeye’s. The coating was nice and dry and the insides were very succulent.
Maybe too succulent. The further I chewed through the huge chunk of chicken, the more mouthfuls I got that were just meat and it was a bit too wet.
It didn’t feel like a natural meat grease kind of moistness. More like the chicken had been dunked in hot water before being cooked. It was weird and I didn’t finish it.
In conclusion, Popeye’s chicken is not too expensive but it’s not as good as KFC or many other places. The burger was great but they should keep their wet chicken hidden inside the wraps and sandwiches.
Our rating: 3/5
Official food hygiene rating: 5/5
Popeye’s did not know we would be doing a review and we paid for our food.