Location: 7080 Saint Barbara Boulevard, Mississauga
Website: https://www.popeyeschicken.ca/

I’m not sure how many fast food burgers and/or sandwiches I’ve eaten in my lifetime, but it’s a lot.  Hundreds?  Thousands??  Okay, probably not thousands, but the number is in the upper hundreds, certainly.

All that is to say that it means something when I make this statement: the Pickle Glaze Chicken Sandwich from Popeyes might be the worst fast food sandwich I’ve ever had.

Here’s how Popeyes describes it: “Our classic chicken breast fillet in a tangy, sweet dill pickle glaze with Louisiana herbs and seasonings, hand-battered and fried to golden brown perfection topped with barrel cured pickle slices.”

It was clear something was amiss as soon as I opened the bag; the smell of dill was immediate and overpowering.

I’m going to be generous and assume that something went wrong with the pickle glaze in my sandwich, because I cannot imagine that anyone would think what I was served should be fed to human beings.  It must have been a mistake.  I need to believe it was a mistake.  But hey, I was served what I was served.  Obviously I’m going to write about it.  I need my sacrifice to mean something.

The flavour was acrid and off-putting.  It tasted like someone in a lab took the flavour of dill, did a mediocre job of replicating it, and then multiplied it by a million.

It tasted like they took the amount of concentrated dill flavouring meant for a hundred sandwiches and dumped it into one.

It tasted like something that isn’t meant for consumption, like trying to swig a bottle of perfume.  Every time I took a bite, I was like “I don’t want to be eating this! I should stop!”  But I was on my lunch break from work and didn’t have any other food, and what was I going to do, throw it out and buy a second lunch??  What do I look like, Jeff Bezos???

The sad part is that the rest of the sandwich was actually pretty good.  The bun was nice and fresh, and the chicken featured a satisfying balance between the crunchy exterior and the relatively juicy meat within.  I had another fried chicken sandwich from Popeyes pretty recently, and this one was much better.

That flavour, though.  It’ll haunt my dreams.