Grace Meat + Three is a known quantity here in the STL, to the point where I had to check and see…read moreif I'd ever reviewed it. I've been there once or twice over the years, and I've eaten from the food truck once or twice.
The fried chicken is fine but kinda underwhelming. It's good, but not to the point where it justifies the price. It's served on a metal tray, on a piece of wax paper, as if it were premium Texas barbecue, but at the end of the day, it's not barbecue. It's just fried chicken.
The dirty little secret of fried chicken is that it's not especially hard to make decent-quality fried chicken. They sell it at gas stations, in grocery stores. Popeyes employees lacking in basic life skills, whom you wouldn't trust to make a cup of coffee, routinely crank out a product as good as anything else you can get in a restaurant.
Not that I'm complaining. I love Grace! It's where I go when my "bad" cholesterol is too low and the balance in my checking account is too high. I'm at a problematic and yet gratifying state of equlibrium after yesterday's visit.
I already kinda knew that I wasn't going to bother with the chicken, but I could hardly read the menu. I almost went with a half-chicken just to avoid having to squint. They've got one of those backlit screens, like at a McDonald's (where everyone just uses the kiosk now anyway), but with worse fonts and less line-spacing. I'm sure they paid a premium for it back in '06 or whatever. Everything in this place is peak stomp clap-era millennial optimism, from back when guys were dressing as lumberjacks. Of course there's a random, incongruous smash burger on the menu. They may or may not be playing Mumford & Sons on the Muzak.
I figured the chicken sandwich, called the OG Crispy, would be a good opportunity to compare it to the famous chicken sandwich at the aforementioned Popeyes. Also, it comes with fries, which spared me from having to take out a loan on my house to purchase them a la carte. At $16 (I think), it'll definitely run you, but in general, the prices here seem less ridiculous than they used to. It's still entirely too much, but somehow not much more than you'd spend at a fast food restaurant.
Are the fries that come with a sandwich the same size that they are if you order them separately? Supposedly, the a la carte side feeds two. I couldn't imagine two people sharing the side that comes with the OG Crispy. Someone might get cut! It was a perfectly fine size for just me. They're seasoned with some sort of blend that's heavy on the black pepper. I would have been fine with just salt, but this was no dealbreaker.
The OG Crispy was great! Was it better than the chicken sandwich at Popeyes? It's hard to say. It's probably a better quality piece of chicken. Similar size. Expertly prepared: nice and crisp on the outside and not overcooked on the inside, which is key for white meat. You're given the choice of regular or hot. I of course went with the hot. I wish the sauce had more tang to it, but it was surprisingly and delightfully hot. Spicy foods in non-ethnic restaurants are so often nerfed, for children and, erm, non-ethnics.
A few people at my table had the po boys, both shrimp and catfish. They looked really good, and not as skimpy as they look in some of the photos posted here. I might have to try one, once my LDL subsides and my financial situation recovers. Sandwiches might be the thing to get here. Not that you can truly go wrong with anything.
