After receiving a negative Yelp review, a California restaurant has admitted to using Popeye’s as its main source of fried chicken — and claims it has done nothing wrong.
On Oct. 7, a Yelp user who goes by the name “Tyler H” left a one-star review for Sweet Dixie Kitchen, a restaurant in Long Beach, California that boasts a menu of biscuits and gravy, sweet potato hash, salmon Benedict, Frito pies and bread pudding.
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In the review, Tyler wrote that he saw restaurant employees sneak in two boxes of Popeye’s chicken. He thought that maybe it could be a snack for employees, but later, he thought his chicken and waffles tasted a bit familiar (and a little stale). He asked his server how they prepare the chicken, who confirmed that they do indeed use Popeye’s chicken.
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.
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She insisted that she isn’t doing anything wrong by sourcing her chicken from Popeye’s. For example, she sources the restaurant’s gumbo from a “friend who sells it at a local farmer’s market.” Additionally, the kitchen isn’t equipped with a fryer, so she and her employees have to scrounge up fried chicken some way or another.
“So whatever to you and your little review like it was some great exposure, and whatever to you dude,” she concluded in her rebuttal to Tyler H.
Sanchez’s admission is at odds with her earlier claim on the restaurant’s Facebook page that “everything is made here,” although the wording has since been changed to say that “most” menu items that are made “from scratch,” except for “that darn chicken we bring in.”
The restaurant’s Yelp page is now a war zone between one-star rants and five-star defenses.
“I definitely found [Sanchez’s] response questionable,” food writer Brian Addison told MUNCHIES. “As I started filtering through comments on Facebook, I saw a number of responses from patrons who were largely concerned with where their food was coming from.”
“This certainly has gotten way way out of control,” Sanchez told MUNCHIES. “It isn’t written on the menu since I’m not ‘reselling’ the strips. I am using them only as an ingredient in a menu item featuring our biscuit.”
“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,” she added.
Photo Credit: Ken Wolter / Shutterstock.com
