Sweet Tea, Fixin's, and Biscuits Food Narrative Essay #1 (Revision)

When a truly great thing enters your life, you don’t always take notice. Maybe you don’t notice the entrance because the importance gradually grows, or maybe you don’t realize its importance until that great thing has become rare or even gone. I can’t really remember the first time I ate Bojangles, or even heard of it. I can’t remember how it tasted or smelled the first time. But I can remember the many times I’ve conversed with friends, held Bible study, watched a game, tailgated, even made monumental decisions with a plate of Bojangles in front of me.

If you are not from North Carolina or a bordering state, chances are you have never experienced the culinary wonder that is Bojangles. It’s fairly simple, with the focus of the chain on their “Famous Chicken and Biscuits”. Bojangles’ chicken can be ordered either Cajun style or Southern, as tenders, pieces, or on a biscuit. It’s juicy and flavorful, and is perfectly complemented by the white, rectangular packs of honey mustard. By the way, this isn’t just any honey mustard. The only honey mustard you can have with Bojangles’ chicken is Bojangles’ honey mustard – nothing else works. Bojangles’ honey mustard has a sweetness that manages to dull the Cajun spices of the chicken to the point that your mouth doesn’t catch on fire without completely drowning the taste out. Instead of the typical “side items”, Bojangles has aptly named Southern “fixin’s”, such as mashed potatoes, dirty rice, corn on the cob, and, my personal favorite, seasoned fries. The fries are rectangular and flat, seasoned with a judicious amount of salts and spices, crispy on the outside, and warm and soft on the inside. They are perfectly complemented by the afore-mentioned honey mustard. It’s only been a matter of weeks since I last had my fix, but it seems like years since I’ve opened one of Bojangles’ steaming yellow boxes of chicken and fries.

Now, as good as the chicken and fixin’s are, Bojangles’ two claims to fame in the Carolinas are the biscuits and the sweet tea. The biscuits are fluffy and warm with a slightly crunchy, buttery outer crust. Bojangles’ biscuits serve as a sort of ‘rite of passage’ at my high school, as a highlight of getting my driver’s license meant that I could go to Bojangles before school and parade the white, grease-stained bag to class. When I go to Bojangles, I always save the last few bites in the flimsy paper fry sack to take to my horse, Gamble. Gamble is distantly related to the great racehorse Seabiscuit, and his affinity for Bojangles has earned him the nickname “Bo-biscuit”. It seems fitting that my horse’s favorite food is the same as mine, as he taught me by snuffling an empty box I left too close to his stall. One bite, and Gamble, as I had, became hooked. As hard as I have tried, I haven’t been able to find sweet tea in Alabama that begins to compare to Bojangles’. There really aren’t words to describe Bojangles’ sweet tea that do it justice – of course it’s sweet and cold and refreshing. But it’s fresh-brewed and never tastes like on of those nasty mixes. The tea settles the spicy Cajun flavors that linger just under the crust of the chicken.

There are two Bojangles locations that I frequented back home. The road from my home to Waxhaw must have had my tire marks burned in its memory from my many trips. Every Sunday during the fall, I’d leave church at 11 and hop into my old car, a little blue Jetta, and trek down Providence to pick up my game day meal. My sister and I would speed home to catch the pre-game show and enjoy our chicken with Steve Smith, Julius Peppers, and the rest of the Panthers. Bojangles is the official tailgater of the Carolina Panthers, so it was a natural way to support the team. The second location was on Highway 51 in South Carolina, a four or five minute drive from the Morrison Family YMCA, and I’d swing by on my way home from work a little too often.

Aside from the tasty food, Bojangles also has an amazing ability rarely found in the genre of fast food. It is, in fact, a cure-all for whatever is ailing me. I was an after school counselor at Morrison Family YMCA, which backs up to a very nice patch of woods. As one can imagine, this is a favorite place for runaway kids to flee. After a particularly frustrating incident with a disillusioned 7 year old who sulked in the woods for 15 minutes, a 32 ounce, 77 cent sweet tea chased the migraine away in a flash. If I bombed (another) Calculus test and watched my GPA sink into oblivion, a kid’s Chicken Supremes with fries and honey mustard could momentarily make me forget my recent academic atrocities. A headache or heartbreak can be cured by a simple stop at the drive-through window, and it’s a medicine I’ve sorely missed since my arrival in Tuscaloosa.

Remember that part in the beginning where I said that sometimes you don’t realize how truly great something is until it’s gone? It comes into play here. I was all set on coming to Tuscaloosa, when I realized a slight problem. There is exactly one, okay, maybe two, Bojangles in the entire state of Alabama. I know for a fact there is one in some city that starts with D, and despite my limited grasp of Alabama geography, I know it is nowhere near Tuscaloosa. I grappled with this truth for quite sometime, but I couldn’t honestly not attend the University because my favorite restaurant isn’t nearby, or so I reckoned. My parents came to visit, promising a box of biscuits and a jug of sweet tea, but arrived empty-handed, having missed the last opportunity in Georgia. It will be another month before I return to Charlotte, but I can already detect the faint scent of a biscuit, the seasoning on the fries, and taste that sweet tea waiting for me across the Alabama state line.