Church's Spicy Southern Style Chicken Sandwich (Sort Of)

More than once I've called the Southern-style chicken sandwich at Church's Chicken the best fast food chicken sandwich. How could that be improved upon? Easy: make it spicy. According to Church's website, the new version of the sandwich is served with "our yummy spicy mayo." That sounded great and I headed up to Church's to give it a try.

I've tried not to mention this too much, because I do like Church's... but the Pasadena location is terrible.  I won't go into all the details, just give you the most important one: they screw up my order more than half the time. But even I wasn't prepared for this one.

I stood around for several minutes being ignored before the woman behind the thick glass barked at me: "What do you want?"

"I'd like the spicy southern-style chicken sandwich, please."

She did not say anything for one minute, just stared at the register. Finally she spoke again: "The southern-stye sandwich?"

"The spicy southern-style sandwich," I corrected her.

"That will take six and a half minutes," she said.

I said that was fine and stood around waiting. Six minutes later she spoke to me again: "Do you want the sandwich spicy?"

"Yes," I said.

"So you want the buffalo sauce on it?"

"No, I want the spicy mayo," I said, pointing at the giant picture of the sandwich directly behind me, the one clearly showing the spicy mayo on the sandwich.

She disappeared and returned two minutes later to hand me my sandwich. I took it to the car and unwrapped it.

It had buffalo sauce on it. Of course. I guess saying what I wanted four times wasn't quite enough.

Was it good? Sure. It's still a Church's sandwich: the bun was soft and warm, the chicken was crispy and juicy. But it would have been better if they'd given it to me as they advertise it and as I'd ordered it. 

There is a Church's Chicken in Monrovia. It's much cleaner, they have never gotten my order wrong and they are very friendly. (You will never be greeted there by a woman shrieking "What do you want?") That's the Church's I'll be going to from now on. Of course, it's 10 miles farther away, so I won't be going there as frequently, but whatever. I've given the Pasadena location far more chances than I should have.