Last week food critic Simon Wilson took rookie fine diner Madeleine Chapman to upmarket restaurant The Grove. Then she took him to her restaurant of choice – here are their reviews of KFC.

This piece was first published in December 2017. Read part one, The Grove, here.

Madeleine Chapman

The wicked wing was divine. Served on thin cardboard and surrounded by carbs in all its forms, the wing was a picture of crispiness. Juicy on the inside with a crunch that could give you goosebumps if you let it. Inside was almost meltingly soft.

Simon Wilson and I went to KFC Fort St at 12pm to avoid the lines and avoid the lines we did, so much so that we managed to avoid people altogether. We ordered two Superstars Meals at the self-service kiosk. Before we went to The Grove, Simon had sent through the full menu so I would know what was in store. It didn’t help me at all in understanding what we ate but I appreciated the gesture. In return, I sent him a link to the Superstars Meal on the KFC website. I’d decided we’d both be having a Superstars Meal because it offered the widest range of KFC menu items. If one felt like making false comparisons, one might call it KFC’s very own degustation.

For his wine match, Simon chose L&P, a classic local fizzy drink that, as a kid, I drank at special occasions and pretended was wine. Fitting. I chose Fanta while silently cursing whoever was responsible for ending KFC’s iconic relationship with Pepsi and getting into bed with Coca Cola. As the late, great Prince famously wrote, Nothing Compares 2 U [the pairing of original recipe and Mountain Dew]. Simon made as if to open his wallet and I cut him off. He’d paid the $582 bill at The Grove a few nights before (it would’ve been financially irresponsible for me to even suggest we go dutch on that one) so I wanted to handle this bill of exactly $25 all by myself. Then we took our table buzzer thing and sat down to nervously wait for our order to arrive.

At least I waited nervously. My emotional investment in our trip to KFC was much higher (I think) than Simon’s investment in our trip to The Grove. Simon likes the finer foods but has never been vocal about any sort of love for The Grove in particular. Meanwhile, my love for KFC has been well documented. Have you ever told someone that a movie was really funny, then watched it with them and died a little every time they didn’t laugh? This was like that. Except Simon had already told me he didn’t like KFC so it was more like telling someone who hates Will Ferrell that they’d love Anchorman. While we waited I pointed out the USB plugs in the wall at the table, a cool idea that’s less cool when you don’t have a USB charger handy, which neither of us did.

That’s all the big-upping I had time for because the food arrived in about two minutes. The plating was pretty good. One piece of original recipe, one wicked wing, one chicken strip, one medium popcorn chicken, medium potato and gravy, medium fries, and a medium drink. That’s a lot of food to arrange and whoever did it very nearly managed to make it not look like a complete mess.

I started with the original recipe because I always start with the biggest item in a value pack. There’s nothing worse than getting to the end of a pack and then realising you have a whole chicken breast left. Simon started with the wicked wing and, in a move that surprised me, dunked it into his gravy. He then looked as if he were going to bite right into the middle of it and I had a vision of me being responsible for him unwittingly breaking two front teeth on a wicked wing so I yelled out “watch out those have bones!” He paused, looked at me, and said what I believe to be the quote of the year, “you think I don’t know the anatomy of a chicken?”

My piece of original recipe was good but I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was. Either a thigh or a breast. I guess I should’ve asked Simon because you’d be correct in thinking I don’t know the anatomy of a chicken. Whatever it was, it was fine. Sometimes KFC serve up some real dud pieces but this one was perfectly fine. By the time I got around to my chicken strip, I looked up to see that Simon was almost finished already. Suddenly I felt bad. Nobody eats that fast unless they’re having a crappy time. It was like on those wife swap TV shows where there’s always one cool mum who takes the conservative kids out clothes shopping and to get their ears pierced, while the other mum tries to force the cool kids out of their piercings and into a church. In this situation, I was the uncool mum and KFC was my church.

Pretty soon Simon was packing up his empty boxes, except they weren’t completely empty. I couldn’t help but notice there were still chips, popcorn chicken, and potato and gravy left in their containers. I noticed it and I fought the instinct to finish what he hadn’t, because I knew that at that exact moment, 646km away in Newtown, Wellington, my Mum just got angry for no apparent reason. Instead I powered through the rest of my meal and we left. After spending five hours at The Grove, we were in and out of KFC in 25 minutes.

I know a lot of people hate KFC. It’s the epitome of grease and Big Fast Food and very few people who eat it for the first time as adults develop any liking for it. But it’s cheap, and cheap means a lot when that’s all you can afford. Coming from a big family, KFC was and still is one of few affordable options for feeding all of us at short notice (or any notice, for that matter). It’s the saviour of big families. And you can read that as big families or you can read it as brown families, it doesn’t really make a difference.

While waiting for our fifth course to arrive at The Grove, I told Simon about an article I’d read entitled “Do White People Have Cousins?” The article was funny and made an interesting point: “we [minorities] need all the family we can get, whereas white people can go anywhere and be met with smiles, so they just don’t need that extra layer of family cushion.” He was talking about America but it still resonated. The service at The Grove was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, with a waiter who wants to talk to you every ten minutes and is happy to help you with anything and everything. Maybe dining at The Grove is what it’s like to be white. But for everyone else, food that can be eaten with the whole family (your very own community), away from all of that, is most often the preferred choice.

I have a job now which means I can afford to eat at (slightly) nicer restaurants where foods are locally sourced and cooked etc etc. But even with a job I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy from those places when I’m heading to a family gathering of 30 people and need to take a plate. What I can afford, and what will be appreciated, is a bucket of chicken. Even if for that reason alone, there’ll always be a place in my heart and in my stomach for KFC.

Simon Wilson

I didn’t like it. Who’s surprised? I thought the chips were, I don’t know, less than ordinary. Not making a play to be crispy double-fried moreish morsels of excellence, or stringy can’t-get-enough-of-the-saltiness, or good honest hot-and-crunchy fish-and-chip-shop chips, or patented you-only-get-chips-like-this-at-KFC! chips. Or anything, really. Just, we’ve got to do chips but nobody cares so hey. I thought, ok, it’s not about the chips, except is that right?

It is about the potato and gravy, though. The first question almost everybody has asked me is, how was the potatoes and gravy? And my answer is: very little potato, mostly gravy. I don’t remember it used to be like that.

We had the Superstars meal, which Mad chose. There was no coleslaw, nothing in the whole box resembling a vegetable except the potato mash and the potato chips. Superstars don’t eat greens, apparently.

The popcorn chicken things were like anti-food: not quite flavoursome in any positive way, not at all convincing that they actually contained chicken. Little rubbery balls you could probably use as a flavoured toy for a cat you didn’t like.

The bun was the same soft white bread it’s ever been, easy to mash with your gums if you’ve mislaid your teeth. Mad, who has all her teeth, as far as I know, made a kind of butty with hers, adding popcorn chicken and spoonfuls of potato and gravy. I just thought, ‘no’.

She was in her happy place. I know this because she told me. It was almost the only conversation we had, actually. I couldn’t think what to say and she didn’t seem to want to talk. I felt really bad about that. She had gone somewhere and I didn’t know how to follow.

As for the chicken itself, I got a wing, a thin strip of breast and that ribcage bit they never should serve anybody. The breast was dry, so was the ribcage. The best flesh, the only juicy bit, was the wing. Who ever ate chicken when the best bit was the wing?

What else? I had an L&P. It was all right.

As for the new-style upmarket premises, well, good on them. Turns out KFC can make a restaurant that isn’t an insult to urban design and it’s very popular. So why don’t they do that more often?

Anyway, the universe is one big whole, right, and KFC is its rotten stinking heart. I went out of there and I had a little weep for my friend Connie Clarkson.

Bear with me. On the evening of the Thursday before last, at an event in Henderson Valley Road in west Auckland, just a short hop from the fast-food fantasia of Lincoln Road, Connie launched The Kitchen Project. It’s an incubator for people who want to start up a food business: migrants, and others, who might know how to cook but want to learn the rest of the operation. Especially, although not exclusively, it’s a hand up for women.

A kitchen for product development. A mentoring resource to help with: how to scale up recipes to commercial quantities, how to order and manage food supply lines, employ staff, borrow money, manage cashflow and keep the books, how to build a digital presence and grown a customer base, how to run a stall or a foodtruck or a bottling business. How to survive and how to grow.

The Kitchen Project is about healthier eating, and building communities and empowering the people who most often get most overlooked. It’s about strengthening the local economy: building networks among local food growers and suppliers and their customers and reinforcing the value of sustainable economic practices.

The old world meets the new. Economic resilience and opportunity in the culturally rich but profoundly challenged poverty-stricken parts of the city.

Connie Clarkson is the commercial place operations manager at Panuku Development Auckland. Panuku is the council’s community development agency and is funding the operation with support from ATEED, which is in charge of economic development for council. They’re working with Healthy Families Manukau, Manurewa-Papakura and Healthy Families Waitakere, along with local community groups.

Connie’s been working in food all her life: once upon a time in high-end restaurants and more recently as the woman who put the food trucks into Silo Park and the food stalls onto Queens Wharf. Her great love is “cheap eats” – all the deliciousness of dumplings and curries and noodles and wraps – and the people who make them, the experts of the ethnic cuisines of this city.

Her inspiration for The Kitchen Project is San Francisco’s La Cocina, an enterprise that’s been doing work like this since 2005. Its deputy director, Leiticia Landa, was in Auckland for the launch of The Kitchen Project, advising Connie and her Panuku colleagues and doing her bit to enthuse everyone with the life-changing potential of the project. She told me, pretty bluntly, that La Cocina is “a poverty alleviation organisation”. Connie Clarkson has the same gleam in her eye.

Right now, The Kitchen Project is at proof of concept stage: they’ve called for applications (find out more and apply here) and will select an initial cohort of six to eight participants in March. The funding is secure only till June, and there’s private sector investment to find as well as longer-term support from Panuku and/or ATEED. In time, the participants will be out in the world paying their own way. The Kitchen Project itself has to do that, to a degree, as well.

Connie is my friend and I don’t mind admitting bias. But yes, I do hate KFC. And it’s not because of the disappointment of the food itself: it’s for the same reason I hate The Man Who Ate Lincoln Rd. Not the man himself, he’s ok, but the whole phenomenon of it.

It’s the celebration of crap. The peculiar ability to regard some of the worst elements of capitalism as harmless fun, just because they make a product you like.

I imagine almost everyone would think what Connie is trying to do with The Kitchen Project is a good idea. But not everyone thinks it has anything to do with our fast-food culture. And yet all the things The Kitchen Project is good for are undermined by super-fatty, super-sugary, super-cheap fast food. And with Lincoln Rd, you can throw in another problem: the slack planning rules of the old Waitakere City Council that allowed that urban landscape to become so blighted.

Why does Joseph Parker accept fast-food sponsorship? Why do the Warriors, why does cricket’s Big Bash League in Australia? Don’t worry, I know the answer. Even if it was legal, these days they wouldn’t accept that support from a tobacco company. And good luck trying to find a photo of Parker enjoying any of his sponsor’s products. His trainers would have a fit if he actually ate the stuff.

How is the KFC Fight for Life a thing, when we all know the Holiday Menthols Fight for Life would be absurd?

Am I overstating it? The BBC reported just last week that children in poverty are twice as likely to be obese by the age of five than their least-deprived peers. Twice as likely. (Also, that only one city in Europe has managed to reduce obesity rates: cycle-friendly Amsterdam.)

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have treat food, and I’m not saying treat food has to be good for you. It’s pushing 20 years since I last ate KFC, but I used to eat it and so did my kids. They still do. I don’t think it should be banned. I just wish it wasn’t fetishised. I just hope Connie Clarkson makes The Kitchen Project into something fabulous.

Simon and Madeleine visited KFC on Fort St in the city a couple of days after eating at the fine-dining restaurant The Grove. For their reviews of that experience, visit here.

We sent Simon Wilson, who’s been writing about Auckland’s best restaurants for years, and Madeleine Chapman, who regularly wears a KFC tracksuit to work, to dinner at fine-dining restaurant The Grove. Here are their reviews.

Read part two of The Critic and the Rookie: Simon and Madeleine go to KFC, here

Simon Wilson

The quail was divine. Three little rounds of breast, with a leg as well, served with asparagus and leeks variously done as a puree, strips and whatnot, and some kumara that had been prepped confit style in cocoa butter. It looked gorgeous on the plate, a big circular swirl of the rich dark-green puree and those sliced ballotines of meat just sitting there begging to be forked. Flavoursome, almost meltingly soft.

As for the drumstick, you picked it up, little finger aloft, and sucked all the meat off the end of the tiny bone in one: a marvel of crisp-skinned, red-meat moreishness. You’re allowed to laugh, it’s part of the fun.

My Spinoff colleague Madeleine Chapman and I were eating at the fine-dining restaurant The Grove. I love a good restaurant and she loves KFC and somebody had said, why don’t you both go to both, and review them? So we said, oh all right, and now here’s me on The Grove, with Mad below; and next up we really are doing KFC. We ate together but we didn’t discuss what we’d say and we’ve both written our reviews without knowing how the other really felt.

I chose The Grove because I don’t think anyone in Auckland is better at sophisticated cheffing than their star, Ben Bayly. The tastes and textures of his dishes fit together seamlessly, almost always, which you know means he’s gone to enormous effort to get it right. That skill was on show with the quail, and in a gorgeous slice of sheep’s milk terrine flavoured with capsicum, with fish and peas, with beef and radicchio; in his ability to combine delicate texture and robust flavour – an oyster, a little “hot dog” of pulled pork, those fish and meat dishes – and in the complements and contrasts of the sauces and shavings and blobs and foams that accompanied everything.

And there was tuna tartare with little slices of octopus tentacles, served with tempura wheatgrass and horseradish sorbet. The tempura batter barely there, a sensation on the tongue of fine feathery crispyness; the deep sharp aftertaste of the sorbet adding complexity to every other thing on the plate.

We ate the seven-course degustation with matching wines, and there was also a bunch of single-mouthful starters, one of them served on a bed of pohutukawa flowers. Nice touch.

Near the end they brought out a small mound of rice and raspberry ice cream for each of us and made them into bombes Alaska. Piping on the meringue in a rising spiral around the mound, torching it, pouring over some grenadine and torching that. Old styles are back. Then they brought a souffle to sit alongside, a texture that seemed like it might still be liquid but was puffed up light as light, honestly, it defied description. And over the minute or two before they disappeared onto our spoons and into our mouths, they did not collapse: Ben Bayly knows the physics of cooking so well he knows how to defy it, or seem to, which is the same thing in the culinary arts. That dessert dish was delicious and I was so impressed.

Few chefs keep the flavour when they lose the toughness in meat, even fewer really know how to let you taste the constituent parts in a dish and also appreciate the whole. Easy on the eye, easy in the mouth. I mean this as praise but also as criticism.

The food lacked surprise. It was all so smoothly coordinated, the aim seemed less to astonish than to not offend. Food with the edges knocked off.

The service was attentive although not fully so. Nobody appeared to take my jacket when I took it off, which would mean nothing at all in most restaurants but is supposed to be a defining mark of service when it’s fine-dining. They’re meant to be watching every table all the time. Nobody came to replace my napkin when I dropped it, either.

We told them early on that it was Mad’s first fine-dining experience and, because they knew I was a food writer, we also told them we would both be writing about it. I did think they would take that as a cue to make sure her night was special. I mean, wouldn’t you? But all the servers who brought food or wine – maybe four of them during the evening – turned to talk to me, then remembered themselves about 20 seconds in and talked to Mad, but then couldn’t help themselves and angled back to me.

I was struck by the unevenness of the wine selection, which has always been a specialty of the restaurateur, Michael Dearth. The first three pairings were all straw coloured. They were all unusual enough – a couple from Sicily and a chardonnay/pinot noir blend (yes, true) from Trinity Hill in Hawke’s Bay. But honestly, they were so similar I found myself wondering, if he’d lined them up for a tasting, whether I’d be able to tell them apart. Dearth told us the Trinity Hill “divides people”. He buys a bulk order and good on him – taking risks and following your heart is as good a thing to do with wine as it is with most things. All I can say, with apologies, is that I was on the other side of the divide.

Later, we had a really brilliant cabernet-sauvignon blend from Destiny Bay on Waiheke and a lovely champagne rosé from Collet in France. I could have settled in with either of those. But there was also a Pedro Ximenez to go with the last dish of the night, which had been made with Pedro Ximenez. I thought, mmm, is that a bit obvious for a pairing?

Besides, it didn’t work because the dish needed calming down, not enflaming. A bloated concoction of chocolate, ice cream, butterscotch, beetroot and granita infused with that PX, it was the largest dish they served us and the richest, and the only one not exquisitely presented – basically, it came as a big blobby mess in a bowl.

What happened? The previous dish was that extraordinary and superbly entertaining combo of bombe Alaska with soufflé. It was as if Chef Bayly had gone home, leaving the dishwasher in charge, and he was having a laugh.

There was one other big shock on the menu, courtesy of the cocktails list. For $22.50 you can buy something called The Gremolata: vodka, two sorts of gin and sake, with parsley and lemon and, because hey why not, garlic and chilli.

Maybe in some supercool universe whose portals are forever hidden from me, that’s a thing. But all I could think was, it’s a trap! Order that and you’re basically inviting the restaurant to treat you like a moron. In fact, order that and they’ll finish your meal with a big bowl of mega-rich sherry food. They did seem rather of a kind.

The Grove used to have super cocktails and I’ve rated it several times among Auckland’s best drinks and best places for a drink. But now, I don’t know. That chuck-in-a-bit-of-everything experiment wasn’t the only problem. The chilli-infused tequila cocktail Mad ordered was enormous, all its flavours overwhelmed by the chilli, so that it sat on the table for most of the evening, unloved, mocking us.

Mine was much better: a clever joke of parsley-infused gin, sage oil, rosemary and thyme, kind of a super-dirty martini served in a coupe. It tasted great, the savouriness of the herbs offset by the thyme-flecked sugar stuck to the rim. But it did look preposterous, with a long frond of rosemary stuck all round the inside of the glass.

The bread was nice enough, which is to say forgettable little sourdough rolls. The menu descriptors were not always true to life (see the photo of the terrine, above). Mad’s tea at the end came in a large and very elegant teapot: a splendid touch. The water was warm, and then, with one of the refills, it was suddenly chilled. All the staff said hello and welcome. Even after Mad and I went outside to get our photo taken, and then walked back into the restaurant, and a couple of them greeted us all over with big smiles and welcomes, not recognising us from just five minutes earlier.

We had a lovely evening. We really did. It’s a gracefully proportioned and decorated room, the white tablecloths do their thing, we ate a lot of lovely food and we stayed on afterwards, talking. We were there for nearly five hours: you don’t do that if the restaurant hasn’t looked after you. Did it cost a lot? With cocktails, wine matches, coffee and tea, yes it did: the bill came to $582.50. So was it special?

I thought that little quail leg was certainly going to be the best drumstick I would eat this week (yes, I did know I was going to KFC). Hell, best this year.

But no, it wasn’t special. Here’s the measure: do I feel like I need to have that experience again? I don’t. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t transported. I was impressed, but for all the proficiency that went into those dishes, I wasn’t seduced. Too much comfort, not enough courage.

For Madeleine Chapman’s review, read on.

Madeleine Chapman

I didn’t know The Grove existed until Simon Wilson sent me the menu as an option for my first ever fine-dining experience. I studied the menu closely and didn’t recognise a single word, so I knew it was the place for me.

Before we walked in on Tuesday night, Simon pointed out that my denim jacket collar was folded in. I nearly walked home right then in a cone of shame. I couldn’t even underdress properly.

Simon took off his coat and within 15 seconds had informed me that someone should’ve already taken it from him. I tssk’d sympathetically. Looking at the cocktail menu I once again questioned my grasp on the English language. I spotted a $22.50 cocktail that appeared to include four different spirits in it. Surely I was mistaken. Mixing spirits is what you do when you’re at a party and there’s nothing left to drink so you get the last dribbles of every bottle on the kitchen bench. The waiter soon confirmed that there were in fact multiple spirits mixed together and that the cocktail was nice but only “if you like that sort of thing”. I’m still not sure if he was referring to alcoholics or young losers. Either way, I baulked and ordered a drink with chilli-infused tequila that, spoiler alert, really tasted a lot like chillis.

We were asked if we’d like to do the petite degustation (four courses) or the full degustation (seven courses). I blurted out seven before Simon could consider the alternative. If I was going to fine dine and not have to pay for it, I was gonna eat the most food possible.

They immediately started bringing out appetisers, the first of which was caviar (what I assume rich people eat for every meal and as a snack at the movies) on a potato chip (not a poor man’s potato chip but a fancy one) on a pohutukawa flower (just a regular pohutukawa flower, not for eating). It was made up entirely of things I’d never eaten before and it was delicious. Here’s an incomplete list of things I ate for the first time at The Grove:

Caviar – Not as gross as I thought fish eggs would be. (It’s fish eggs, right?)

Oyster – Never ate before because I assumed I would be allergic to them. I’d seen people do that thing where they suck/slide the oyster into their mouth. I was too scared to try that move so I kinda just put most of the shell in my mouth then tipped the whole thing over so it fell out.

Fried oyster – Hadn’t broken out in hives from the uncooked oyster so I guess I’m not allergic. Both were delicious.

Uncooked lamb – Looked like raw mince. Maybe even tasted like raw mince but I’ve never tasted raw mince so wouldn’t know. Was nice though.

Pork hot dog – Seems weird to utter the words ‘hot’ and ‘dog’ in such a fancy place but they set theirs apart by forgoing a corndog stick for an actual stick that I assume they picked from the trees in the courtyard. The stick was clean though, and the pork was one of the few dishes I could’ve eaten five more times.

Sheeps’ curd – Like a paté but very creamy and fancy and once again, delicious. It kept slipping off my fork and I was embarrassed that I couldn’t even use a knife and fork correctly but turns out the fork was crooked.

Cold-pressed spring tomato water – Was dramatically poured over the sheeps’ curds. Honestly can’t say it made any difference to the dish.

Pressed tuna – How do they slice it so thinly? If The Grove can’t make me like pressed tuna then maybe it’s just not for me.

Octopus – I don’t remember eating anything that looked like an octopus but it’s on the menu so I guess I did.

Horseradish sorbet – This was gross. Maybe I just don’t like horseradish but it had the consistency of yoghurt and the taste of strong mints and dirt. I still ate most of it though because it would’ve been rude not to.

Quail – Blessed be the gods who gifted us quail. This was one of my favourite dishes because it was the tenderest meat I’ve ever tasted. Harps played softly under my tongue as the afterthought of a scent danced alo- Jesus Christ food writing is hard. Simon told me you can get quail at any good butcher but something tells me any future tasting will be a disappointment after my glorious introduction.

Soufflé – I don’t know how it’s scientifically possible for something so fluffy and light to stay risen but it did and it melted in my mouth and was maybe even better than a Sara Lee Bavarian Swirl. The second dessert dish (a chocolate sorbet with butterscotch and BEETROOT) was most certainly not as good as a Sara Lee Bavarian Swirl.

Bombe Alaska – This was amazing in that a French man with a strong accent and a good beard did a fancy pottery-wheel trick to make the meringue shell. I heard him say the word ‘meringue’ and knew that I shouldn’t eat it because I can’t eat uncooked egg. But it was one of the last dishes and looked so fancy so I ate it anyway. My throat was very itchy after that.

Wine – Turns out rich people binge-drink way more than young people, they just have a better name for it: wine match. Simon said they’d only pour “a small amount” with each dish. Well Simon is either an alcoholic or a terrible judge of volumes because they poured a near full glass for each of the seven courses. I nodded along to all the descriptions that were uttered too quietly, and usually in Simon’s direction, not mine, by the man with the beard. Then I asked Simon to explain it in English once he’d left. What I do remember is one particular wine that was half red and half white. Again, why is mixing drinks frowned upon when young people do it but is cool and hip when fancy people do it?

We were there for five hours. If we were in a rush and had nothing to talk about, we probably could’ve been out of there in three. By the time we left, there was no one in the restaurant but the staff. And I think they would’ve stayed there until we decided to leave, even if it was 3am. Ridiculous. On the way out I used the bathroom where there were no paper towels, just actual individual hand towels. Then a waiter helped me into my denim jacket at the door. When I got home I saw I still had half a Wonka Nerds rope left over from the day before so I ate it for supper and went to bed a distinguished woman who dines at The Grove.

Read part two of The Critic and the Rookie (KFC) here