• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Long Beach CA Restaurant admits to re-selling Popeyes Chicken

J

jbug617

Banned
On October 7, a Yelp user who goes by the name "Tyler H." posted a one-star review of Sweet Dixie Kitchen, a restaurant in Long Beach, California that boasts a menu of biscuits and gravy, sweet potato hash, salmon Benedicts, Frito pies, and bread pudding.

He claimed that he saw workers sneak a bag of Popeyes chicken into the kitchen shortly after he and a friend were seated at the restaurant. He'd assumed that the chicken was a snack for the kitchen staff, but when his $13 plate of chicken and waffles arrived at the table, he found the taste of this chicken eerily familiar and a touch too stale. When he asked his waiter where the restaurant had sourced the fried chicken, the waiter admitted that it came from none other than Popeyes.

The restaurant compensated Tyler and his friend for the meal, but Kimberly Sanchez, the restaurant's owner, responded the next day to the Yelp review. "We PROUDLY SERVE Popeyes spicy tenders," Sanchez wrote.

She insisted that she wasn't doing anything wrong in getting her chicken from Popeyes; for example, she wrote, she sources the restaurant's gumbo from a "friend who sells it as a local farmer's market." Besides, she says, the restaurant's kitchen isn't equipped with a fryer, so she and her staff have to outsource their chicken one way or another. "So whatever to you and your little review like it was some great exposure, and whatever to you dude," her rebuttal to Tyler H. concluded.
Click to expand...
https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/art...ampaign=trendsus&utm_source=munchiestwitterus

They interview the owner and she believes she has done nothing wrong. She says the chicken is only a ingredient.
 
X

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/art...s-its-been-serving-popeyes-chicken-for-months

California Restaurant Admits It's Been Serving Popeyes Chicken for Months
The restaurant's Yelp page is now a hotbed of one-star reviews. But the owner insists she didn't do anything wrong.

Mayukh Sen
Oct 18 2017, 8:30am

It began with a Yelp review.

On October 7, a Yelp user who goes by the name "Tyler H." posted a one-star review of Sweet Dixie Kitchen, a restaurant in Long Beach, California that boasts a menu of biscuits and gravy, sweet potato hash, salmon Benedicts, Frito pies, and bread pudding.

He claimed that he saw workers sneak a bag of Popeyes chicken into the kitchen shortly after he and a friend were seated at the restaurant. He'd assumed that the chicken was a snack for the kitchen staff, but when his $13 plate of chicken and waffles arrived at the table, he found the taste of this chicken eerily familiar and a touch too stale. When he asked his waiter where the restaurant had sourced the fried chicken, the waiter admitted that it came from none other than Popeyes.

The restaurant compensated Tyler and his friend for the meal, but Kimberly Sanchez, the restaurant's owner, responded the next day to the Yelp review. "We PROUDLY SERVE Popeyes spicy tenders," Sanchez wrote.

She insisted that she wasn't doing anything wrong in getting her chicken from Popeyes; for example, she wrote, she sources the restaurant's gumbo from a "friend who sells it as a local farmer's market." Besides, she says, the restaurant's kitchen isn't equipped with a fryer, so she and her staff have to outsource their chicken one way or another. "So whatever to you and your little review like it was some great exposure, and whatever to you dude," her rebuttal to Tyler H. concluded.

Sanchez's admission was at odds with the restaurant's earlier claim on its Facebook page that "Everything is made here," though the messaging on that has since been amended to clarify that "most" menu items that are made "from scratch," barring "that darn chicken we bring in." (Popeyes has not responded to request for comment from MUNCHIES regarding the legality of using its chicken as an ingredient without disclosing that to customers on a menu. We'll update if the company gets back to us.)

The restaurant's opacity struck food writer Brian Addison, the former executive editor of the Long Beach Post who now operates his own publication titled Longbeachize, as particularly dissonant. Addison had, earlier this month, put Sweet Dixie Kitchen on his list of Long Beach's essential breakfast joints. After being alerted to the Yelp reviews and Sanchez's responses to her patrons, though, he surfaced the complaints from the restaurant's clientele in an article published Monday of this week.

The restaurant's Yelp page is now congested with one-star reviews and passionate five-star defenses. Addison's article prompted Sanchez to post a 583-word paragraph to Facebook yesterday morning, one that's since been edited heavily, wherein she incorrectly associated Addison with Foodbeast and equates the level of vitriol she's received to a smear campaign against her business. (A screen grab of Sanchez's original post is below.)
Click to expand...

"It isn't written on the menu since I'm not 'reselling' the strips," Sanchez told MUNCHIES. "I am using them only as an ingredient in a menu item featuring our biscuit." She also claims that the incriminating text on the restaurant's "About" page on Facebook was written about two years ago, when it was indeed true that all dishes were made-in house. "If we can't make it from scratch, I intend to find the next best thing if we include the ingredient on our menu. Hopefully my customers appreciate that."

"I not only bleed just like you all, but I have a staff," Sanchez said. "A woman who supports her kids. A guy trying to find an apartment. A college student paying her way through school. I love them as if they were my kids."

Addison told MUNCHIES that he's been vilified as a man trying to take a small business down. "I've gotten messages to the effect of, how dare you crucify a small business like this," he said of the past few days, quietly aggrieved. That argument doesn't hold too much sway to him, after all: Sanchez has made comments against patrons quite publicly, and the proof is in the pudding.

Sanchez, though, is just waiting for this fracas to blow over. "If the decisions were wrong or misleading to some, I wholeheartedly apologize. Fox News said it was a rant, and it is not," Sanchez wrote MUNCHIES regarding the way her Facebook post has been framed by national media. "It is from my heart."
Click to expand...
 
M

MCN

Banned
Fucking hell, if you don't have the facility to make fried chicken, then don't put it on the fucking menu!
 
C

Crimsonclaw111

Member
Is she stupid? Why the fuck would anybody go there to pay more for Popeyes when they can literally go to the same Popeyes that they source from, since it's close enough to still serve.

Hope that business craters, and now that the yelp page is listed they're about to get fucked.
 
L

Linkstrikesback

Member
" Besides, she says, the restaurant's kitchen isn't equipped with a fryer, so she and her staff have to outsource their chicken one way or another. "So whatever to you and your little review like it was some great exposure, and whatever to you dude," her rebuttal to Tyler H. concluded."

So either buy a fryer and train your cooks to use it, or don't sell fried chicken, christ.
 
A

Atomic Playboy

Member
Linkstrikesback said:
" Besides, she says, the restaurant's kitchen isn't equipped with a fryer, so she and her staff have to outsource their chicken one way or another. "So whatever to you and your little review like it was some great exposure, and whatever to you dude," her rebuttal to Tyler H. concluded."

So either buy a fryer and train your cooks to use it, or don't sell fried chicken, christ.
Click to expand...

"We don't have a pizza oven, but if you give us your address, we will have Pizza Hut delivered with a 300% markup."
 
Z

ZiggyPalffyLA

Member
Linkstrikesback said:
" Besides, she says, the restaurant's kitchen isn't equipped with a fryer, so she and her staff have to outsource their chicken one way or another. "So whatever to you and your little review like it was some great exposure, and whatever to you dude," her rebuttal to Tyler H. concluded."
Click to expand...

What a terrible business owner...how does someone like this even get the money or approval to start a business?
 
J

JKM78613

Neo Member
Holy shit, I’ve eaten at this place multiple times. Didn’t get fried chicken but thought the place was pretty good.

Stupid response by the owner - I definitely don’t recall any mentions of Popeye’s on their menu.
 
T

Timeaisis

Member
I'm not even that mad...but $13? Come on now. Serve me Popeyes at your fancy restaurant, I don't care, but charge me Popeyes prices.

Also, I'm pretty sure this is an episode of Seinfeld or King of the Hill or something.
 
H

hypernima

Banned
0SKQEyy.jpg
 
B

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
And yet if you bought frozen chicken from Costco, cooked it and sold it, that would be fine.

I wonder if there's actually a legal difference.
 
T

tearsintherain

Member
Haha, that is pretty ballsy to serve food from another place and straight up not deny but embrace it.

It would be fascinating to go through their yelp reviews and see what people say about their chicken. Way too many people put too much trust in yelp reviews.
 
R

rjinaz

Member
JKM78613 said:
Holy shit, I’ve eaten at this place multiple times. Didn’t get fried chicken but thought the place was pretty good.

Stupid response by the owner - I definitely don’t recall any mentions of Popeye’s on their menu.
Click to expand...

And it seems like they have solid reviews, well before this, and loyal customers. I mean just WHY?! The thought processes people go through to arrive at such stupid decisions must be amazing.
 
S

StrangeRoboMemory

Member
The mental image of this is hilarious...this would have been a perfect crappy kids' movie in the 90s: group of radical kids gets the brilliant idea of reselling fast food and marketing it as fancy, then a bunch of uppity fancy folks are convinced that they're eating high quality delicacies and the kids are slapping each other high fives behind the scenes.
 
J

JKM78613

Neo Member
rjinaz said:
And it seems like they have solid reviews, well before this, and loyal customers. I mean just WHY?! The thought processes people go through to arrive at such stupid decisions must be amazing.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it’s a monumentally stupid decision by the owner. Whatever - definitely not driving down to Long Beach anytime soon to eat there.
 
B

blugbox

Neo Member
Ummm lady you don't even have to have a fryer to fry chicken. There is such a thing as pan fried. How stupid can you be to pull shit like this, then defend it with that kind of attitude?? Puts a bad name to all places actually doing real cooking.

Can't wait to hear how Popeye's responds to their product being heavily marked up and sold with no mention at all...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

  • Poll
Long Beach restaurant caught serving Popeye's chicken as part of their meals
0
356
jbug617 replied
  • Locked
Human cost of conspiracy theories.
2
69
8K
Raonak replied
Former Rockstar Designer Says Former Top Executive Groped Him
46
5K
MisterBrimstone replied
  • Locked
Bon Appétit: SF the best food city in US right now, has best new restaurant of 2015
2
52
6K
Desi replied
  • Locked
ITT: weird stories from weird jobs
2
73
10K
StrangeRoboMemory replied
Top Bottom