“He says, ‘What do you think about calling it Popeyes?’ My mom said, ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of. “He was on a double date at the movies with my mom seeing The French Connection with Popeye Doyle as the badass main character,” Al Jr, who began working at Popeyes at the age of 14 as a morning biscuit baker, says. Speaking of names, how did Copeland, who would have all of his managers and crew members attend a nine-hour biscuit college to obtain a certification in baking Popeyes’s signature side, come up with the name for his chicken chain? The whole brand changed and it became Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken and Biscuits.” I never would have believed a biscuit would’ve been able to do that, but it did. It ended up being a genius move because it increased sales by 25% across the board. “He wanted the biscuit to be a hero product just like the fried chicken. “I actually thought he was kind of crazy when he first did it because he wanted to showcase it,” Copeland’s son Al Jr. Among them, alongside instructions on how to make family favorites like Ricochet Catfish and Fettuccine Lamborghini, is the biscuit recipe Copeland cooked up in the late ‘70s after realizing he could differentiate Popeyes from its chicken competitors by offering something other than a dinner roll as a standard side. Though Copeland, a tenth-grade dropout who always said he was too poor to afford an apostrophe for his restaurant’s name, passed away in 2008, his Creole- and Cajun-inspired recipes live on at more than 3,400 Popeyes locations worldwide, as well as in Secrets of a Tastemaker: Al Copeland The Cookbook.īeing released in September to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Copeland’s chicken empire, the book contains more than 100 recipes, some of which are close to, but not exact replicas of, the ones that are used at Popeyes. The confusion for Ubochi and other first-time customers was because biscuit means cookies in British English, not the salty, flaky creation Popeyes founder Al Copeland developed a recipe for and put on the menu of the chain he founded in New Orleans in 1972 after failing with another restaurant, Chicken on the Run, the year before. “It looks like a scone, but it doesn’t taste like one,” customer Victoria Ubochi told The New York Times. Though the opening weekend was a hit, there was one menu item that caused confusion: the buttermilk biscuit. In January of last year, Popeyes opened its first location in Britain and had hundreds of customers wait in line for hours at a food court inside an East London shopping mall in East London to get a taste of American fried chicken.
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