My family attends Chick-fil-A every Saturday morning the way other families attend things with…read morebetter parking and a bulletin. We have done this long enough that it no longer feels like a choice. It is a condition. Henry, who is nearly eight, has not willingly eaten food anywhere else since sometime during the first Bush administration, a claim I recognize as medically impossible but which feels, spiritually, correct. He will eat here. He will eat the Chick-n-Minis specifically, and only here, and I have stopped asking why, the same way you stop asking why the moon controls the tide. It just does. Some things you accept.
I opened my biscuit and studied it longer than a man should study a biscuit. The chicken inside was shaped, with real and startling precision, like the state of South Carolina, complete with a little coastal flourish where Charleston would be. I have now opened at least eleven of these biscuits over the past eleven weeks and every single fillet inside bears the same coastline, which either means Chick-fil-A employs a cook with a very specific and very committed sense of cartography, or something else is going on that I don't have the security clearance to understand. I choose not to look into it further. Some questions close doors you can't reopen.
On Clemson home game Saturdays we get it to go, which is the only variation permitted in the routine, and which we treat with the gravity of a constitutional amendment.
I order from the table on the app, where the name on file has read "Cluck Norris" for longer than I can remember. The receipt comes out the same way every time, printed and delivered by an employee who has clearly seen it before and has decided, correctly, that this is not the hill to react on. A man ordering a chicken biscuit under the alias of a beloved television actor's poultry-based alter ego is, to this staff, simply a day that ends in "Y." I have enormous respect for a team that will not give me the reaction I am so clearly fishing for.
Jeri was there this Saturday, at a table near the window, wearing a cardigan with a multi-cat T-shirt busy enough to qualify as a small weather event, and she said hello to every single person who walked past her, including several people who did not appear to know her and one man who was clearly trying to get to the bathroom. She has been doing this for as long as anyone can remember, greeting the entire restaurant one table at a time like a woman running for a very small, very beloved office. Nobody has ever seen her in a bad mood. I have started to suspect this is less a personality trait and more a structural feature of the building, like the ceiling.
Five stars, because Henry finished every Chick-n-Mini, and because South Carolina keeps showing up inside my biscuit, and because I am going back next Saturday whether I understand any of it or not.
