KFC, City Cross Arcade

The Dirty Bird has regularly changing menu of limited time only specials - none of which have been particularly good (I'm thinking particularly of that nacho-cheese-corn-chip abomination where the sauce completely overpowered the taste of the rest of the burger and caused the corn chip layer to lose its crunch - not very well thought out. Or anything with that too-sweet fake-smoky sauce. Blurg!). But I keep ordering from the specials menu because I am ever hopeful that one day I'll find the perfect crunchy chicken. What can I say? I'm a chicken optimist.

Sweet sesame crunch chicken is the new menu item at KFC. Understandably, I got my hopes up - IT ACTUALLY HAS 'CRUNCH' IN THE NAME!! SQUEEEEE!!

In fact, sweet sesame crunch chicken delivered on 2 out 3 promises - and one of those was subtle as a bum full of smarties. (Can you guess which promise wasn't delivered....?)



Sesame seeds? Check! Sweet sauce? Check (but more on this later). Crunch? No bingo. You'd think something with crunch in its name would be crunchy. It wasn't. This may well be because it was sitting under lights for too long but HOW HARD IS IT TO DO CRUNCHY CHICKEN, PEOPLE?

Now, let's talk about the sweet sauce. It's billed as being 'Asian style'. I'm not sure what KFC think is 'Asian style' but I expected a hint of chilli or citrus or ginger or something. Couldn't detect any of those flavours - or any flavours at all for that matter. It was just sweet, sweet and sweet. Did I mention it was sweet? To be fair, the sweet sauce did do a good job of cutting through the salty chicken, which is presumably its purpose.

Conveniently, the sweet sesame crunchy chicken combo comes with a piece of original recipe chicken for comparison. Could I detect any particular difference. The sweet sesame crunch batter was certainly more textured - but not necessarily more crunchy. And the sweet sauce did provide a bit of richness that the original recipe didn't have. But that's about it.

Unless KFC can figure out to pump up and retain the crunch in the allegedly crunchy batter it's not something I'd order again because this is not the perfect crunchy chicken.