The King of Breakfast
...WHICH BRINGS ME TO CHICK-FIL-A BREAKFAST. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything, there’s no need to navigate backwards in your browser to figure out how that sentence started. What you just read, my friend, is a full-on sentence fragment. And boy is it a sharp one. In some ways, though, this whole harebrained scheme - all of the hours spent sampling Chick-fil-A lunch options and then brooding about them literarily - has been leading up to this moment. In other words, Chick-fil-A lunch was the first part of the sentence, but it really only served to set up this breakfasty conclusion. Not that I’m done devouring lunches; there are still at least a few of those rampaging around out there in the wilderness in need of a good slaying. But breakfast has gone too long un-talked about, so I’m electing to take this very necessary detour into breakfastland.
The only logical place to start this journey is the most obvious one: the Chicken Biscuit. Or, as I like to refer to it behind closed doors (when we’re alone), the King of Breakfast. I’m a little unclear on how fried chicken snuck into the breakfast rotation in the first place (the fried chickens didn’t sneak into the rotation themselves, I’ll tell you that - they’re dead as hell), but its position on Chick-fil-A’s menu is unassailable. My history with the Chicken Biscuit is long and storied and begins sometime in Middle School when I was but a young lad, small of stature, low of confidence, and full of dreams of one day tracking down puberty (or a Zoltar machine) and forcing it to make me Big. Specifically, it begins in sixth grade.
In sixth grade, we sixth graders gained access to the “Break Stand,” a weird little octagonal kiosk located in a weird little rectangular courtyard run by other students like some kind of warped, preppy, Lord of the Flies-inspired social experiment. The Break Stand probably sold all kinds of junk food/hard drugs, but the only things I ever had eyes for were the authentic Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuits that some good samaritan saw fit to pick up every morning in time for the designated 10:30 AM break period. The Chicken Biscuits in question were sold out of a cooler for two dollars apiece (two dollars seems suspiciously low, but maybe my brainbox is busted or inflation wrecked the Chicken Biscuit industry after the world’s computers failed during Y2K), but supplies were extremely limited, so diminutive Middle Schoolers swarmed the Break Stand like it was...I don’t know, Fred Durst? Nelly? Whatever was awesome in 1998. Chumbawamba.
Since I was something like thirteen years old and had no source of income outside of stripping copper wire and selling it to the local junkyard, I was forced into the seedy underground world of high-interest Middle School mortgages. My daily routine was this: rocketship out of class at 10:30 directly at the Break Stand, bang my head into its wall, realize that I was still thirteen and had zero dollars, search my person and backpack for anything of value, begin bartering. It wasn’t unusual for me, tweaking hard for a Chicken Biscuit, to borrow two dollars from a friend and frantically promise to pay them five dollars the next day, or ten dollars the day after that if I forgot. Ten dollars for a two dollar loan is 400% INTEREST. On one occasion, I traded a Swiss Army pocket knife, which had been a birthday present, for a Chicken Biscuit. That’s how real shit got.
I love Chicken Biscuits. Believe it or not, I’ve actually tried to be impartial with this Chick-fil-A project, but my love for Chicken Biscuits is absolutely biased, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I won’t live that lie. Someone in Chick-fil-A’s mothership kitchen figured out the perfect biscuit recipe, and each biscuit is fluffed up like my favorite pillow sheathed in a butter-slathered pillowcase. I wouldn’t want to sleep on it, necessarily, but I’m more than happy to eat it. From what I can tell, the chicken breast is my old familiar lunchtime friend - stalwart, fried, intended for lunch - only zapped with a shrink ray (or made out of tiny chickens!). While I do sometimes wonder if maybe there’s a different spice situation at work for the breakfast version, I usually end up deciding that my mind is just re-contextualizing everything based on the biscuit’s presence and therefore playing tricks on me. At some early point along the miraculous journey that is my life, I started putting honey on my Chicken Biscuits, and that’s a habit I continue to indulge as of May 2015. I blame the Break Stand. I don’t know why, but I’m almost positive it had a hand in this. It has a hand in everything. I do feel a little better knowing that Chick-fil-A employees generally offer honey with breakfast orders, so I don’t think I’m too far afield of rational human behavior here, but there’s always the possibility that the honey is actually intended to be used for coffee or hashbrowns or direct ingestion or something.
You might think I’d be an easy sell on the Spicy Chicken Biscuit given my established preference for the Spicy Chicken Sandwich, but if you think that, you’re wrong, so quit acting like you know me. The Spicy Chicken Biscuit is definitely good, and I tend to gravitate towards spicy breakfasts in general, but for some reason I like to keep my Chicken Biscuits heat-free. It’s probably a nostalgia thing, but I’m not here to psychoanalyze myself. That’s up to you. If you’re a Spicy Chicken Biscuit man/woman (or a Spicy Chicken Biscuit with fingers and a computer), I think that’s great, and I wish you godspeed and happy trails and Merry Christmas - I’m just not that into it.
Here’s something else to think about: McDonald’s is about to start serving breakfast ALL DAY. That in itself doesn’t do much for me - I eat McDonald’s breakfast about once a year, if that, and only when I’m lost - but if other restaurants get jealous and follow suit...well, that’s a potential gold mine of Chicken Biscuits. That’s a gold mine that, instead of being full of gold, is full of Chicken Biscuits. That’s a FULL-SIZED UNDERGROUND MINE FULL OF COAL AND COAL DUST AND MINERS AND INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED CHICKEN BISCUITS.
Chicken Biscuit: 10/10
Spicy Chicken Biscuit: 7.9/10
HBITSCTAS: A Chicken Biscuit is basically an oversized notary stamp in every way. I'm sure if you have enough honey on there you could use it to make documents official/really sticky.
Drive-Through: Mornings in the drive-through line are way easier than lunchtimes. No complaints.
