Craving for Fried Chicken

So lately I've been craving fried chicken. Here in Montréal, if there is one thing that's lacking it's a good southern cooking style restaurant that serves up some good fried chicken with hot biscuits, mash and corn. I mean we have KFCs here (known in French as PFK - Poulet Frit Kentucky) but that's all we have! And we don't have the same kinds of sides as in the U.S. where they have biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy and corn on the cob. Instead we have coleslaw (radioactive green shredded cabbage), macaroni salad (which does taste awesome though), potato salad (uh.. ew?) and corn, but like from a can, not on the cob, which sucks. And have you tried the gravy at KFC? (Of course you did.) It has this god awful acid salty taste that makes you want to drink a whole gallon of water. To me it tastes and looks like some bastard ate too much chicken with eleven secret herbs and spices and got sick, then someone took that and put in a blender to get rid of the chunks and turned to some gooey purée. I mean that shit is so rank, you could probably use it as fake vomit as a prank, to excuse yourself from class, an exam or from work. As for the chicken, I don't know why, but I have the weird impression that the recipe has changed since I was little. The taste of the deep fried skin somehow burns the back of my throat now and I find the chicken to be way more greasy than it used to be. All in all, KFC's food quality has dropped. I wonder what the Colonel would think if he came back from the dead and witnessed what his achievement had become. Well he probably would come up with some form of Kentucky fried brains recipe I guess since he'd be a zombie.

To get back to the point, Montréal lacks a good southern-style fried chicken joint and here I am craving some good tasty fried chicken. So I went to one of the best chains in Québec when it comes to chicken: St-Hubert. For all of you out there who aren't from Québec, St-Hubert Rotisseries is named after the St-Hubert street here in Montréal where the original restaurant opened in 1951. It's kind of like Swiss Chalet, but a bazillion times better! Their chicken is one of the best chicken in the province country north-america along with the charcoal grilled chicken from the many Portuguese rotisseries here in Montréal. But their specialty is rotisserie chicken. To try to satisfy my craving I too a plate of 4 piece chicken tenders with creamy cole slaw, a garden salad and a half a hamburger bun with a cup of St-Hubert gravy which is as addictive as crack. Though I wouldn't know, I've never done crack. Sadly, I was not satisfied in the end. And I don't think I ever will be unless I go intoxicate myself at the nearest KFC.

What got me started about the whole fried chicken thing is that there's this friend I know who's from Atlanta. I've been doing a bit of research about that city just to learn a bit more about that place through different public forums and read about good places to eat, etc. And every time I read about that place, there's always someone mentioning Chick-Fil-A. In some other places people talk about Bojangle's or Popeye's and I thought "You know what? Montréal has restaurants with cuisines from all around the world, but we don't have any good fried chicken joints." Then I started craving KFC, but I remembered how sick I was last time I went. So I started seeking out an alternative. Sadly, there aren't any. Unless I cross south of the border. Anyone up for a road trip to get some fried chicken?

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