I somehow thought that I needed to eat at at least one of each American fast food restaurant in…read moreFrance. It was a good plan, but the only problem with it is that I didn't prepare for disappointment at KFC of all places. Fried chicken isn't entirely healthy for you, and we all know that. But it has the benefit of tasting extremely good. Here in Paris, you kind of don't get that benefit anymore. You just get really generic and boring chicken that would make Colonel Sanders weep in shame.
For starters, the menu here is vastly different from what you might find in the United States. It's still a restaurant specializing in chicken, but things have surprisingly changed around a lot. I'm not talking about how the menu is (mostly) in French, although that is true. I remember seeing these very large sandwiches on the menu with strange names such as "Tower," "Boxmaster," and "Brazer." I certainly don't remember seeing those back home. Understandably for their size, they were between six and seven euros. I probably should have gotten one of those instead; it probably would have been much less disappointing in the long run.
I wanted to adhere as closely as possible to the traditional American bucket full of chicken wings, and so I ordered their hot wings, six pieces for 6,20€. That also included a "normal-sized" fries, a forty-milliliter Orangina, and packets of ketchup and mayonnaise, so it wasn't like I was paying more than one euro per hot wing. It's a good thing I didn't, because those hot wings are barely like hot wings at all. They're not the sizable, juicy, tender, and delicious fried chicken thighs that I've come to expect back home, but that should have been evident from what I was ordering; the name was even displayed in English very clearly in black and white "HOT WINGS" on the menu.
But these hot wings are not spicy at all or red in color, so it doesn't seem fair to call them hot wings either. There is nothing at all about them to suggest that they're spicy. They're colored normally and taste simply average. Unlike what you'd expect from fried chicken, they're not even greasy. Why are these hot wings called hot wings when they're not even hot (as in spicy)? I don't know. I don't remember getting any hot sauce with my meal, either, so the menu must be a blatant lie. They're just wings, and not even the kind with the blue cheese dip.
There are a lot of problems already, but the kicker here is how small they are. They must have killed baby chickens to get these wings because they're absolutely tiny and would be inexcusable to serve as food in the United States, a country that prides itself on fine fried chicken. There's hardly any meat on these wings, and the little meat that's there doesn't taste nearly as good as the kind you get back in the homeland. Speaking of the homeland, you get the chicken pieces in a nice cardboard bucket there. Here, they give them to you in a flimsy paper bag. How sad. The fact that there are six of these wings doesn't really make things better; they're so small that it probably wouldn't matter whether there are six or sixteen. I was still pretty hungry after eating them.
I also got fries to come with the meal, and they come in a similar paper bag. The receipt says they're medium fries, but there must be a mistake because of how small the bag is. This looks like what would be a small size in the United States, so I wonder what their real small size looks like. The fries themselves are nothing spectacular. They're bright yellow, not soggy or overcooked. However, they are particularly bland and I guess that's where the ketchup and mayonnaise come in. The French people must really like that combination. The drink is just a drink, so there's not much about it I can comment on.
Simply put, the French KFC is an insult to the way Americans serve fried chicken. It is so much inferior to the point that it hardly even resembles the same restaurant. I chose not to give it one star because the food wasn't really that bad, and I had only paid 6,20€ for all this. However, you're better off just not coming here at all and finding a better place to spend your money. If you're lucky enough to be in Paris, you wouldn't want to eat at a place that would make you long to go back home again.
