Geek Soap Box

Many New Yorkers woke up this past Monday morning to a mixture of shock and amazement, as a number of local Dunkin’ Donuts franchises operated by the Riese Restaurants corporation were replaced overnight by Tim Horton’s, the similarly themed chain famous up north in the frozen Canadian tundra.  The “beef” between Riese and Dunkin’ owner YUM Brands stemmed from an infamous incident involving some rather enterprising, unshy, and downright huge rodents in a midtown Manhattan establishment that made waves through the local media a while back.

Eager to show that Canadian can-do and capitalize on such a potentially lucritive opportunity, Tim Horton’s pulled out all the stops — balloons, free samples, and giant anthropomorphic styrfoam coffee cups dominate the landscape now.  Eager to see if the brand lives up to the hype, a coworker and I decided to pay the local Riese combination Horton’s/Kentucky Fried Chicken a visit for lunch.  At the time, it seemed downright yummy to have one of those $5 KFC boxes washed down with some chocolatey donut goodness for dessert.

What a colossial error in judgment.

You see, for starters, this particular KFC on 42nd Street was infamous already for a prior fiasco involving free grilled chicken and a small riot of hungry working-class New Yorkers earlier this year.  Unfortunately, times have not made the management and staff there any wiser.

Let’s start with the line, or rather, the four separate registers open for business.  Given the very tight space the facility occupies, the lunch crowd formed one orderly, logical line ready to take advantage of the next available opening.  Then an employee alerted the crowd to the fact that there should be, in fact, four separate lines, one for each register.  Unfortunately, chaos then ensued, as patrons from the front, back, and middle of the one line devolved into a living, breathing throng of a mob — for, you see, there wasn’t even enough horizontal space in the building to even accommodate four human beings standing side by side.

Brother, can you spare a line?

At this point, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the construction.  Not outside, or in a roped-off area, a gentleman was standing mere inches from the line and food-preparation area doing some presumably important sanding or drilling of some sort, filling the room with both auidtory and olfactory pollution.

Drill, meet softdrink fountain.

For brevity’s sake, I’ll spare you the thrilling details of my actual ordering process, aside from an aside that — between the noise and the cashier’s piss-poor communications skills — it took three attempts to convince him that there was indeed a major difference between “lemonade” and “Coke.”

As to the food, never have I had a more rubbery, anemic looking chicken experience.  Perhaps these were the poor hens that fell victim to the avian flu and could not be fattened up appropriately for Frank Perdue or any other reputable poultry farm.  Somehow, though, when combined with the granite-like biscuit and contradictory greasy-yet-dry potato wedges, I speculate the lousy fare was instead the fault of the establishment and staff.

Oh, and the donuts?  Dry, bland, and … curiously seasoned.

I prefer my donuts “sans ass,” thank you very much.

I do not think I will be returning to this establishment ever again.