All You Can’t Eat: Whataburger Chick’ns Out
Not since my baby teeth left my mouth or Oprah quit TV have I felt so betrayed. Whataburger, the National Fast Food Chain of Texas, changed out its chicken patty for a new model, and I am raging like a drunk horse in a fashionable tea house.
Whataburger’s replacement of the classic Whatachick’n patty with a blasphemous thick-as-hell chicken piece is an affront to Nature, Texas and most of all, me. During my college years in Texas, I used to eat a grilled Whatachick’n literally every day—just as dictated in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I quit several years ago, after learning the magic of cooking soup at home. Recently, I returned to Texas and had the chance to purchase a Grilled Chicken Sandwich from the orange-and-white striped canopy of Texas’ most beloved burger joint. What a terrible night to eat such a curse.
I’m sure you can imagine what that was like, but I plan to tell you anyway. When I went back to Texas, this visit to Whataburger was planned with detail that would put Lance Armstrong’s doping regimen to shame. I’d deliberately gone off my keto diet to re-integrate the regal Whataburger experience into my life, at least for one weekend. Shortly after midnight, we pulled up the drive-through on University Street in Denton and ordered. I managed to keep my excited screams at an adult level.
Inside our car, a smaller vehicle—my human body—was ready for pure eating action. I was tense, and every inch of pure cartilage in my face was laced with glowing anticipation. I was so excited that I had the super-strength experience that only people on PCP know. If I’d been shot, the bullets would have fallen away from me like rainwater. Cobras would’ve melted into smaller cobras at the sight of me. Good and evil were but words to me, and indifferent to the taste sensation I was about to receive. All life’s highways that I’d wanted to ride all night long had headed towards this moment.
Then I bit in—and discovered I was eating what was essentially a huge, gross, gristle-core patty instead of the beautiful narrow plank of chicken I’d devoured for years. It was mostly tasteless protein. This was not my beautiful food, this was not my beautiful meal. To me it smacked of the Burger King and all his devices: ridiculous expansion at the cost of tastiness and quality. Verily, it is the NATO of chicken patties. There was no need for it to grow, no call for it, this needless steroid-infused revision of Texas’ greatest contribution to food science. And yet it came all the same.
Friends, I could not finish a Whataburger Grilled Chicken Sandwich. Five, 10, 15 years ago, that sentence would have seemed impossible to me.
Now it is the rule of the land.
Those of us who have wolfed down grilled chicken by the millions of pounds are a scattered, prudent lot. We grew up eating fast food burgers and switched over at some point to eat a purer beast, the common yardbird. Two legs trumps four legs. The fewer legs, the closer to God. I notice very few of us choose to devour octopus, and I can’t help but think that’s intentional. Legs of two, good for you. Legs of eight, prevaricate.
But eating grilled chicken requires nerves of steel, because it’s so easy to screw up a chicken sandwich. Burgers are fairly easy to get right. A middling beef patty can be rescued by amazing sauces. If you’re a burger cook, don’t hit rock bottom and you’re near the top. But chicken, any kind of chicken, is a different game altogether. Chicken is a highly flexible meat which can be arranged for any purpose, like the lyrics of Eminem can be co-opted for your older brother’s graduate thesis. But the same flexibility which makes a great chicken sandwich easy also makes screwing up the recipe simpler than a taekwondo blackbelt. Bad chicken ingredients equals radioactive doom in the hands of a bad cook.
You can imagine my anger when I came back to Texas this May and discovered Whataburger had Brutus’d me.
What happened? As with World War I, we can see the terrible march to ultimate tragedy by examining the historical record. Several months ago, Whataburger ads in Texas started making flagrant use of the adjective “New” next to its chicken sandwich, which could mean anything from “not actually chicken anymore” to “we are manipulating matter at the genetic level, get religion.” It was highly strange: why mess with perfection? Whataburger’s grilled chicken patty used to be pressed, with a slightly spicy braise to it. The grill was of an obvious, black-marked kind, the sort of brand that lets you know there was once sin in this patty, but it has been driven out by the blessing of fire.