Girl dinner is one of the latest trends taking over TikTok. You might come home one day and find yourself too lazy to cook a traditional dinner like a plate of pasta, chicken and broccoli. Instead, you grab a bunch of unrelated snacks that, when eaten together, make up your entire meal. Girl dinner could be as simple as some carrots and ranch along with a bowl of blueberries and a slice of ham.
The food items that can comprise girl dinner are flexible, given that they’re just regular individual snack items. Hell, I even made my own boy dinner this past weekend with ramen, an egg, tuna and a protein shake.
Popeyes recently jumped on the trend and created a special girl dinner menu consisting of its various side dishes. It includes homestyle mac and cheese, Cajun fries, mashed potatoes with Cajun gravy, red beans and rice, coleslaw and a single biscuit. This is my review of the meal.
First off, the mac and cheese texture was a bit too hard. As I scooped it up with my plastic spork, I could feel some resistance, indicating that my particular order of mac and cheese may have been sitting out for a while. I was expecting the cheese to have a creamy consistency but was ultimately disappointed—the flavor was fine, though.
The Cajun fries were incredible and were my favorite part of the menu. They were hot and crispy like they just came out from the fryer; it was the opposite experience of the mac and cheese, and that made a world of difference. The Cajun seasoning on the fries also gives them an extra kick of spicy and salty flavor.
I recommend dipping your biscuit into the mashed potatoes since the biscuit tastes rather plain, and the Cajun gravy does wonders in enhancing the bread. There’s a risk that you’ll receive a stale biscuit, but dipping it in the mashed potatoes offsets that staleness well.
The red beans and rice wasn’t really anything special—it lacked flavor in the way that the restaurant’s Cajun rice didn’t. The lack of vegetables at Popeyes makes coleslaw an interesting side dish to consider if you’re trying to diversify your meal. However, much like the red beans and rice, the coleslaw didn’t stand out and ultimately tasted bland.
When eaten together, all six items in Popeyes’ Girl Dinner menu are guaranteed to fill you up fast. However, what’s conspicuously absent from the special menu is the chicken. There are plenty of smaller menu items, such as the four-piece chicken nugget kids meal, that’d fit within the definition of girl dinner. Chicken is what Popeyes is known for, so it just feels wrong to exclude such an essential food item.
One of the criticisms of Popeyes’ girl dinner menu is that it’s literally a carbon copy of its sides menu. The only thing that differentiates them is a separate menu on the Popeyes website with a girl dinner logo. When I picked up my order from my nearest Popeyes location, it didn’t come with any special packaging or anything like that—all of the food items were stuffed in a regular bag. That’s important to note because the girl dinner menu is only available online. When I first walked into the restaurant and asked about it, the employees looked visibly confused.
As a result, Popeyes’ girl dinner seemed a bit lackluster. But I guess that’s part of the concept, after all. Girl dinner is just a bunch of random food items you find around your kitchen anyway. In that sense, Popeyes nailed the presentation. By not having one set girl dinner meal and opting for six separate sides instead, customers can pick what they’d like.
Plus, you don’t have to buy all six items. If you’re only in the mood for Cajun fries and coleslaw, go right ahead and order those two. Do you actually want some chicken? Get the three-piece tenders along with your sides. Add a drink to help you get that biscuit down! It’s your girl dinner, after all. It’s all about being flexible.
It may seem like Popeyes hopped on the girl dinner trend without putting in much effort, but by keeping its approach simple, Popeyes managed to capture the essence of what girl dinner really is.